^ 
IN COMMEMORATION OF THE WORK OF 

THE EIGHT THOUSAND YALE MEN 

WHO TOOK PART IN THE WORLD WAR 

1914-1918 



HOW AMERICA WENT TO WAR 

THE GIANT HAND 

THE ROAD TO FRANCE I. 

THE ROAD TO FRANCE II. 

THE ARMIES OF INDUSTRY I. 

THE ARMIES OF INDUSTRY II. 

DEMOBILIZATION 



4 '^1'^'^ 
s-^7 



HOW AMERICA WENT 
TO WAR 

AN ACCOUNT FROM OFFICIAL SOURCES OF 
THE NATION'S WAR ACTIVITIES 

1917-1920 




'^VtffixO'tcce^.^yUZ'y'Xttt. '^i^:^i^/ic^?'u:e tyca^co' 



ty-ti?^i , 



DEMOBILIZATION 

OUR INDUSTRIAL AND MILITARY 
DEMOBILIZATION AFTER THE ARMISTICE 

191 8-1920 



BY BENEDICT CROWELL 

THE ASSISTANT SECRETARY OF WAR AND 
DIRECTOR OF MUNITIONS 1917-1920 

AND ROBERT FORREST WILSON 

FORMERLY CAPTAIN, UNITED STATES ARMY 

ILLUSTRATED WITH PHOTOGRAPHS FROM THE 
COLLECTIONS OF THE WAR AND NAVY DEPARTMENTS 




NEW HAVEN 

YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS 

LONDON • HUMPHREY MILFORD • OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 

MDCCCCXXI 



CI 



D 



Copyright, 1921, by 
Yale University Press 



DEC 19 1921 



■e^CU654258 



vis/' 



CONTENTS 



Chapter 






Page 


I. 


Halt! 1 


II. 


The A. E. F. Embarks 






9 


III. 


The Transatlantic Ferry 






30 


IV. 


Ebb Tide 






47 


V. 


The Process of Discharging Soldiers 






62 


VI. 


Picking Up after the Army . 






74 


VII. 


Soldier Welfare .... 






92 


VIII. 


War Contracts .... 






112 


IX. 


The Settlement of the War Contracts 






126 


X. 


Ordnance Demobilization 






145 


XI. 


Artillery ..... 






163 


XII. 


Ammunition and Other Ordnance . 






181 


XIII. 


Aircraft ..... 






199 


XIV. 


Technical Supplies 






214 


,xv. 


Quartermaster Supplies 






234 


XVI. 


Buildings and Lands . 






256 


XVII. 


Selling the Surplus 






269 


XVIII. 


The Foreign Liquidation 






287 


XIX. 


The Balance Sheet 






315 


Index 









323 



ILLUSTRATIONS 



Armistice Day at Independence Hall 
The Last Shot ..... 
The Armistice at a Munitions Factory 
Victory .... 
Reconstruction . 
Camp Street in Le Mans Area 
Bath House at Brest . 
In Camp Pontanezen 
Company Street in Pontanezen 

1. Entering "Mill" at Bordeaux 

2. Receiving Clean Clothing in "Mill" . 

3. The "Mill" Barbershop 

4. Through "Mill" and Ready for Home 
Kitchens at Le Mans .... 
Street in Le Mans Area No. 5 . 
Casuals on Transport Leaving Brest 
Boarding Transport from Lighters, Brest . 
Troops on Battleship Ready for Mess 
Warships with Troops Docking at Hoboken 
Embarking for United States . 
Mess Room on Converted Cargo Transport Ohioan 
Sailing Day at St. Nazaire 
Transport Maui Loading at St. Nazaire 
Souvenirs of His Service . 
Embarking at St. Nazaire . 
Casuals Waiting to Board Ship at St. Nazaire 
Boarding Edzuard Luckenbach 
Embarkation at Bordeaux . 
Left Behind 
Home Again 

Welcoming Returning Troops at Hoboken 
First Division Parading on Pennsylvania Avenue 
Victory Arch in Washington 
Overseas Troops Entraining at Hoboken 
Veterans Detraining at Camp Sherman 
Discharged Soldiers Receiving Final Pay 
Making Out Discharge Certificates 
Common Grave near Cirey 
Lost Military Baggage at Hoboken . 
Preparing Cemetery at Beaumont 
Loading Coffins on Collection Trucks 



Frontispiece 

Opposite page 4 

4 

5 

5 

12 

12 

13 

13 

" " 22 

" " 22 

23 

23 

30 

30 

31 

31 

" 36 

" 36 

37 

37 

42 

42 

43 

43 

54 

54 

55 

55 

" 60 

60 

61 

61 

66 

66 

" 67 

" 67 

" 78 

" 78 

79 

79 



ILLUSTRATIONS 



1. Overflowed Cemetery at Fleville 

2. Two Months Later — Bodies All Removed . 

1. Romagne Cemetery, April lo, 1919 

2. Romagne Cemetery, May 30, 1919 
Portrait of Colonel Ira L. Reeves 
Students at Beaune University .... 
Art Students in A. E. F. Training Center, Paris 
A. E. F. Students in University of Lyon . 
Air View of Pershing Stadium, Paris 
American Soldiers at University of Grenoble . 
A. E. F. Soldiers as Comedians .... 
Judging Comedy Horse at 4th Army Horse Show 
Disabled Veterans Taking Federal Training 
Editorial Conference of Stars and Stripes . 
Poster Used in Reemployment Campaign 
Employment Office at Camp Sherman 
Sending Out the Stars and Stripes 
Graduate A. E. F. Students at Edinburgh University 
Review of "Pershing's Own Regiment" at Coblenz 
Games in Le Mans Embarkation Area 
Portrait of War Department Claims Board 
Convalescent Reading Stars and Stripes . 
Hospital Train in United States 
Havoc Wrought by German Guns at Fort near Rheims 
"Wipers" Ready for Tourists 

French and German Airplane Engines after Combat 
Ruined Tanks near Cambrai 
American Field Guns on the Rhine . 
American Gun on Ehrenbreitstein, Coblenz 
Destroying Captured German Ammunition 
A Captured Ammunition Dump 
Preparing Liberty Engines for Storage 
Assembling Plant at Romorantin 
Flying Field at Issoudun . 
Lame Ducks .... 
American Airplane Wreckage . 
Fuel for the Bonfire 
German Locomotive Taken Over by A. E. F. Engineers 
Engineers Constructing Beaune University 
Air View of A. E. F. Ordnance Docks 
A Gas Demonstration ..... 

Motor Transport in France .... 
Part of A. E. F.'s Surplus Motor Equipment . 
A. E. F. Supply Train on Way to Ration Dump 
A. E. F. Flour on Way to Starving Austria 
A. E. F. Horses to be Sold .... 
Storage Warehouses at Jeffersonville Depot 
West Indian Laborers Embarking for Home . 



Opposite page 86 

86 

" 87 

" 87 

94 

94 

95 

95 

100 

100 

101 

101 

" 108 

" 108 

109 

109 

" " 122 

" " 122 

123 

123 

" J44 

" 145 

" 145 

" " 164 

164 

" 165 

" Its 

" 180 

" 180 

" 181 

" 181 

200 

2CX) 

201 

201 

212 

212 

" 213 

" 213 

" 230 

" 230 

" 231 

" 231 

246 

246 

" 247 

" 247 

" 268 



ILLUSTRATIONS 



View of Camp Sherman .... 
In an Army Retail Store .... 
Customers at Opening of Army Retail Store 
Wreck of Coal Mine at Lens . 
Motor Transport Salvage in France . 
Portrait of Interallied Purchasers . 



Opposite page 



XI 

268 
269 
269 
310 
310 
311 



ACKNOWLEDGMENT 

The authors acknowledge their indebtedness to Major Robert 
H. Fletcher, Jr., General Staff, who collected from the various 
war department bureaus concerned most of the material on 
which this book is based. Also their thanks are due to the 
numerous former and present officials of the War Department 
and officers of the Army who read the manuscript and criticized 
it constructively. 

B. C. & R. F. W. 
Washington^ D. C, 
September, ig2i. 



DEMOBILIZATION 



CHAPTER I 
HALT! 

AT a few minutes past ten o'clock of the morning of No- 

AA vember ii, 1918, the Secretary of War in Washing- 
-/ ^ ton received from General Pershing a communication 
informing the Government that eleven o'clock a.m. that day, 
French time, an armistice with Germany had gone into effect. 
No message more momentous had ever come to the American 
War Department. The World War was at an end. It was 
peace. It was victory. 

Over there on that American front which had penetrated 
the supposedly impregnable Argonne and now commanded 
the enemy's main line of communications at Sedan, boys in 
our own khaki wriggled, charged, fought, plunged ahead all 
the morning, like the players of some mighty football team 
gaining every inch of advance possible before an intermission ; 
and finally, as the whistles shrilled and the great silence fell 
at last upon a theatre that had shaken and roared with the 
thunder of war for more than four years, they set their heels 
into the turf of a line that was to be held as a starting-off place 
if the armistice, too, should prove to be only an intermission 
and a period of recuperation. 

Behind these outpost men were the American Expeditionary 
Forces, two million strong. Behind the A. E. F. in America 
was a training and maintenance army nearly as numerous. 

Behind the uniformed and organized Army as it existed 
on the eleventh day of November was another force of a 
quarter of a million men, technically under arms. These were 
Selective Service men, drafted men, entraining that day and 
adding themselves to the human flood sweeping on toward 
Germany. In number this force alone was larger than any 



2 DEMOBILIZATION 

ever previously enrolled at one time in the American military- 
service, except the forces called to the colors during the Civil 
War; yet so expanded had become our values that they 
attracted only passing attention in the midst of larger war 
activities. These inductives were one more increment — that 
was all. 

And behind the Army itself were twenty-five million Ameri- 
can men between the ages of eighteen and forty-five, registered, 
classified, and numbered in the order in which they too in turn 
should join the current that led, if necessary, to the supreme 
sacrifice. 

The foundation on which rested this human edifice was 
industrial. Nothing less than the whole of America's material 
resources had been pledged to the end of victory. The whole 
of America's resources ! How inadequately could pigmy man 
realize their might before he took them all and formed and 
molded them into one single-purpose machine ! That machine 
was born in travail that broke men's bodies and reputations, 
that threw down the mighty from their seats and exalted those 
of low degree, that moved inexorably but surely. And when 
the machine was built it released forces terrifying even to men 
accustomed to administering the greatest of human activities, 
forces well-nigh ungovernable. 

It took seven million workers, men and women, to operate 
the war industrial machine — seven million Americans delving 
in the earth for ores, chemicals, and fuels, felling the forests, 
quarrying the rocks, carrying the raw materials to the mills, 
tending the fires and the furnaces, operating the cranes, guid- 
ing the finishing machinery with a precision never before de- 
manded, slaughtering the beeves, curing the meat, packing 
the vegetables, weaving the fabrics, fashioning the garments, 
transporting all, and accomplishing the million separate tasks 
necessary to the munitioning of the Army. 

And as a background to all this, behind both the military 
and the industrial armies, was another force, perhaps the 
greatest force of all — the will of the people themselves, of 
one hundred million Americans who, without the coercion and 



FALT! 3 

duress of law and as a ] .r :"> voluntary act, denied their appe- 
tites, their pleasures, .'..^J. -heir vanities, contributed their 
utmost to the war finances, made war gardens to add to the 
food supply, produced millions of articles for the comfort of 
the soldiers both well and wounded, and in one way or another 
put forth effort that did not flag until victory came. 

Such was America in a war that truly threatened her exist- 
ence — America invincible. 

The armistice put an end to all this enterprise and effort. 
It did more — the armistice was a command to the Government 
to scrap the war machine and restore its parts to the peaceful 
order in which they had been found. In military law, an armi- 
stice denotes the temporary cessation of hostilities; but the 
armistice of 1918 was a finality. Its terms destroyed the Ger- 
man military power. Those in authority, aware that the armi- 
stice was to be no period of waiting with collected forces for 
the outcome of negotiations, did not pause even to survey the 
magnitude of the thing they had built: they turned imme- 
diately to the task of dismantling it. Some of the processes of 
demobilization began before the guns ceased to fire. Five days 
before the armistice the A. E. F. canceled many of the for- 
eign orders for important supplies. On November 1 we 
stopped sending combatant troops to France. In late October 
the Ordnance Department created an organization for de- 
mobilizing war industry. 

However, before the machine could be knocked down and 
its parts distributed, it had to be stopped. There are two ways 
of stopping the limited express. One is to throw a switch 
ahead of it — effective, but disastrous to the train. The other 
way is to put on the brakes. 

The war-industry machine had attained a momentum almost 
beyond mundane comparisons. Slow in gaining headway, like 
any other great mass, as thousands added their brains and their 
muscles to its progress it gathered speed until, at the first day 
of the armistice, it was nearing the point at which it could 
consume the material resources and turn them out as finished 
war products up to the capacity of American mechanical skill 



4 DEMOBILi: ; ;ON 

and machinery to handle them. I' liad not quite reached that 
point. Many of the vital but easily m, .nufactured supplies had 
long since reached the pinnacles ^i their production curves, 
but some of the more difficult ones were not yet in full manu- 
facture. On Armistice Day, however, the industry was not more 
than six months away from the planned limit of its fecundity. 

For the administration of the industrial enterprise the task 
ahead was first to bring that momentum to a halt and then to 
break up the machine. The easiest way was to throw a switch 
ahead of it — in other words, to issue a blanket stop-order on 
all military manufacturing projects. But to have done that 
would have been to court consequences as disastrous as those 
of war itself. Business and industry would have fallen into 
chaos and the country would have been filled with jobless 
men. The other way, the way chosen, was to apply the brakes 
to the thousands of wheels. 

The magnitude of the task ahead was appalling. The liqui- 
dation of the war industry was seen to be a matter as complex, 
as intricate, as full of the possibilities of error and failure as 
the mobilization itself. In only one respect did demobilization 
begin with an advantage: there was at hand an organization, 
the organization which had administered the creation of the 
Army and the manufacture of its supplies, ready to be turned 
into a wrecking crew. 

Balanced against this situation was the countering fact 
that the men of this organization were war weary. Ahead of 
them were none of the conspicuous rewards that follow con- 
spicuous war service. The nation does not award medals and 
other honors to those who restore the conditions of peace. The 
people themselves were satiated with war and desired nothing 
so much as a space in which they could forget battles and cam- 
paigns. At best, demobilization was to be a thankless job. 
Moreover, many of the executives, particularly those in the 
industrial organization, were men of large personal affairs, 
serving their country at a sacrifice. For the most part they were 
disheartened men, denied the satisfaction of seeing the full 
fruition of their plans have its effect against a hateful enemy. 




Photo by Signal Corps 



THE LAST SHOT 




Photo by Signal Corps 

THE ARMISTICE AT A MUNITIONS FACTORY 



HALT! 5 

Every interest of personal gain called to them after the armi- 
stice to desert their official posts and return to the satisfactions 
of private endeavor, and only the righteous sense of their duty 
to the nation held them in the organization. 

It was necessary for the organization not only to remain 
intact, but to speed the activities of demobilization as it had 
sped those of mobilization. The pre-armistice spirit had in 
some way to be maintained. On November 1 1 the war was 
costing the United States about $50,000,000 a day. Every 
day of indecision in adopting the plan of demobilization and 
every day's delay in carrying out the plan added tremendously 
to the burden of taxation that would rest upon the nation for 
generations to come. 

Demobilization meant, first of all, the disbanding of the 
American Army. Whatever economic considerations might 
graduate the termination of war industry, no such considera- 
tions were to be permitted to retard the homeward progress of 
the troops. Four million American homes demanded their men 
at once ; and whether the immediate return of the troops meant 
unemployment and distress or not, the Government was deter- 
mined to comply with the demand. 

The creation of the Army and its movement toward France 
had involved the rail transportation of about 8,000,000 sol- 
diers in special cars and trains. The home movement would 
require an operation almost as great. Of the 2,000,000 men of 
the American Expeditionary Forces, more than half had 
crossed the ocean in foreign ships, all of which, of course, were 
withdrawn from our service immediately after the armistice. 
The unbroken eastward transatlantic procession of troopships 
had continued for about fourteen months. On the first day of 
the armistice the transatlantic ferrying capacity of the 
American-flag troopships was not much in excess of 100,000 
men a month. Moreover, practically all our troop transports 
had reached the point of having to be laid up for recondition- 
ing. Assuming, however, that they could be kept in continuous 
operation, they could not bring back to America more than 
two-thirds of the troops in the time it had taken the whole 



6 DEMOBILIZATION 

A. E. F. to cross to France. Yet the problem of demobilization 
was to repatriate the A. E. F. in that time at most. 

Demobilization involved a final cash settlement with every- 
one of the four million men under arms; computations of back 
pay, complicated as they were with allotments and payments 
for government war bonds and the war risk insurance; and, 
finally, the payment to each soldier of the sixty-dollar bonus 
voted by the Congress. Demobilization also included the care 
of the wounded for many months after the fighting ceased, 
their physical and mental reconstruction, and their reeduca- 
tion to enable them to take useful places in the world. 

On the industrial side demobilization was the liquidation 
of a business whose commitments had reached the staggering 
total of $35,000,000,000. Demobilization meant taking prac- 
tically the entire industrial structure of the United States, 
which had become one vast munitions plant, and converting 
it again into an instrumentality for producing the commodities 
of peaceful commerce. This without stopping an essential 
wheel, and also in the briefest possible time, for the world was 
in sore need of these products. Efficient demobilization, it 
follows, would permit the 7,000,000 industrial war workers to 
turn without a break in employment from the production of 
war supplies to that of peace supplies. 

At the base of modem business stability lies the inviolabil- 
ity of contracts. He who breaches a contract must expect to 
pay indemnity, and the Government cannot except itself from 
this rule. Demobilization meant the suspension and termina- 
tion of war contracts running into billions in value, many of 
them without a scrap of paper to show as a written instru- 
ment; it meant termination without laying the Government 
open to the payment of damages, and therefore it implied the 
honorable adjustment of the claims of the contractors. 

One of the conditions on which complete demobilization 
depended was the adoption of a future military policy for the 
United States. But this was in the hands, not of the military- 
organization, but of Congress. The whole program, therefore, 
could not be put through until Congress had acted. After the 



HALT! 7 

policy was defined, then it became the duty of the demobiliza- 
tion forces to choose and store safely the reserve equipment 
for the permanent establishment and for the field use of a 
possible future combatant force until another war industry 
could be brought into existence. 

When that had been done there would remain a surplus of 
military property. It thereupon became the function of de- 
mobilization to dispose of this property through a sales organi- 
zation that would have in its stocks goods of a greater variety 
and value than those at the disposal of any private sales agency 
in the United States. This branch of the work also included 
the sale of great quantities of A. E. F. supplies in Europe, 
which was already glutted with the surpluses of its own 
armies. The sales at home must include the sale of hundreds 
of buildings put up for the war establishment. 

Paradoxically, demobilization included the acquirement of 
large quantities of real estate — for the storage of reserve sup- 
plies and the creation of a physical plant for the permanent 
military establishment. 

Finally, demobilization meant the delicate business of 
striking a cash balance that would terminate our relations with 
the Allies, meeting their claims against us for the supply of 
materials and for the use and destruction of private property 
abroad, and pressing our own claims against them for materials 
sold to them. 

The astonishing thing was the swiftness with which this 
great program was carried through. Within a year after the 
last gun was fired America had returned to the normal. The 
whole A. E. F. had been brought back in American vessels in 
ten months. In that time practically the entire Army had been 
paid off, disbanded, and transported to its homes. War busi- 
nesses were braked to a standstill in an average time of three 
months, without a single industrial disturbance of any con- 
sequence. At the end of the year the greater part of the manu- 
facturers' claims had been satisfied with compromises fair 
both to the contractors and to the Government. The savings in 
contract terminations and adjustments had run into billions of 



8 DEMOBILIZATION 

dollars. A blanket settlement had been made with the Allies, 
thus virtually closing up our business in Europe. A permanent 
military policy had been written into law. The storage build- 
ings and spaces were filled with reserve materials inventoried, 
catalogued, and protected against deterioration. Packed away 
compactly were the tools and machinery of an embryonic 
war industry ready to be expanded at will in the event of 
another war. Materials, largely of special war value and there- 
fore normally to be regarded as scrap and junk, had been sold 
to the tune of billions, the exercise of ingenuity in the sales 
department producing a recovery that was remarkably large, 
averaging 64 per cent of the war cost. 

Such was our war demobilization. No other single business 
enterprise in all human history compared with it in magni- 
tude ; yet, in the midst of the peace negotiations and amid the 
economic crises fretting the earth, it attracted scant notice. 
To-day, only the continuing sale of surplus war materials and 
the adjudication of the last and most difficult of the industrial 
claims give evidence of the enterprise which engaged the 
efforts of the whole nation so short a time ago. 



CHAPTER II 
THE A. E. F. EMBARKS 

THE American Expeditionary Forces, on November 1 1, 
1918, were ill prepared to conduct the manifold 
activities leading to their demobilization. Up to that 
day the expedition had been too busy going ahead to think 
much about how it was to get home. But now had come the 
armistice, the end. The great adventure was over. The guerre 
was jini. 

At once a great wave of homesickness spread over the 
A. E. F. That song of careless valor, "Where do we go from 
here?" to the swinging beat of which a million men had 
marched forward over the French roads, became a querulous 
"When do we go home*?" When indeed*? It had taken nearly 
a year and a half to transport the A. E. F. to France. Dis- 
regarding the fact that the Army overseas had at its disposal 
less than half as many troopships as had supported it up to 
November 11, before the men could start home in great num- 
bers there had first to be created in France an embarkation 
system with a capacious equipment of camps and port build- 
ings, if the expedition were to return in good order and not as 
a disorganized mob. 

Never was a daily journal scanned with such emotion as 
was the Etars and Stripes by its readers during this period of 
waiting. The S>tars and Stripes was the official newspaper of 
the enlisted men of the A. E. F. After the armistice anything 
pertaining to the return of the troops to America was the most 
important news which the publication could possibly print. 
The S>tars and Stripes published the monthly schedules of 
transport sailings, told of the extraordinary expansion of the 



lo DEMOBILIZATION 

Yankee transport fleet, noted the continual improvement in 
the shipping efficiency of that fleet, rejoiced in black-face type 
when some ocean flyer broke the record for the turn-around, 
as the round trip to America and back was called, and in gen- 
eral kept the personnel of the expedition informed of the 
movement homeward. But, although the return of the A. E. F. 
was a transportation feat actually more astonishing than that 
which had placed the forces in Europe, yet to the hundreds of 
thousands of homesick boys who watched the brown fields of 
France turn green in the spring of 1919, the pace of the snail 
and the turtle seemed speed itself in comparison to the prog- 
ress made by the demobilization machine. 

The A. E. F. in November, 1918, possessed no port equip- 
ment capable of quick conversion into a plant for embarking 
the expedition. There had been no need of large port installa- 
tions in France for the use of debarking troops. The A. E. F. 
had crossed to France under a scheme of identification that was 
a marvel of system and organization. Once the system was 
perfected, every military unit bore as part of its name a so- 
called item number that told the debarkation officers (by 
reference to the shipping schedules) exactly where each unit 
should go upon arrival. So it was with individuals and small 
detachments traveling as casuals. Their item numbers placed 
them instantly in the great structure of the A. E. F. No need 
for vast port rest camps in which thousands must wait until 
G. H. Q. disposed of them. They were placed before they 
sailed from America. Expense and confusion saved by the art 
of management I 

The armistice changed all about. Our military ports in 
France had to become ports for the embarkation of troops with 
an equipment vastly expanded. America had sent to France an 
Army perfectly clothed and accoutered. For the sake of uni- 
formity the home ports of embarkation had prepared the 
2,000,000 troops for the voyage, and this meant issuing 
smaller or larger quantities of clothing and other personal 
articles to practically every man who sailed. The A. E. F. 
proposed to return its men to their homes well dressed, clean. 



THE A. E. F. EMBARKS ii 

and self-respecting, and it was logical, too, to accomplish this 
purpose in France in the process of embarking the troops. To 
carry out the plan, however, required an extensive plant, 
something not to be materialized by a wave of the hand. 
France after the armistice was to witness an extensive military 
construction carried on by the Americans at their ports. 

Brest, Bordeaux, and St. Nazaire had been the three prin- 
cipal landing places for our troops sent to France directly from 
the United States. Brest, near the northeasternmost extremity 
of France, possessed a harbor with water that could accommo- 
date the largest ships afloat, but the water near shore was too 
shallow for docks at which large ships could berth. Conse- 
quently the troops rode in lighters between ships and shore. 
This was Brest's chief disadvantage as a military port, but it 
was not a serious disadvantage. 

Next southward came St. Nazaire, on the Loire River a 
few miles inland. The first of the expeditionary troops landed 
at St. Nazaire, in July, 1917. The port boasted of docks with 
berths for troopships, but the waters of the river were too 
shallow for the largest transports. 

Still farther south was Bordeaux, fifty-two miles from the 
ocean on the Gironde River. What few troops landed at Bor- 
deaux were incidental, for the port construction at Bordeaux 
and other great developments at Bassens and Fauillac nearer 
the mouth of the river were conducted by the A. E. F. with the 
view of making the Gironde the chief ocean terminal for the 
reception of army supplies shipped from the United States. 
Troopships could tie up to the docks at Bordeaux, but the 
Gironde was so narrow and its tidal currents were so swift 
that the military administration of the port had to manage 
the stream on a schedule as it might operate a single-track 
railroad. There were several places in the river where vessels 
could not pass each other. 

After November 1 1 followed a few days of indecision and 
bewilderment in the A. E. F. No one in Europe knew precisely 
what the armistice meant or what the victorious armies could 
expect. Quickly, however, it transpired that the armistice was 



12 DEMOBILIZATION 

permanent; it was peace itself for all practical purposes, and 
the only forces we should need to maintain in France would be 
those chosen to conduct the measured advance into Germany 
and to garrison the occupied territory. Within a week General 
Pershing designated the troops for the Army of Occupation 
and released the rest of the American Expeditionary Forces 
(more than half its total numerical strength) for return to 
the United States as soon as transportation facilities were 
available. He charged the Chief Quartermaster of the expedi- 
tion with the duty of embarking the returning forces.* 

The Chief Quartermaster of the A. E. F. at once designated 
Brest, St. Nazaire, and Bordeaux as the ports of embarka- 
tion. The early plan was to send 20 per cent of the expedition 
home via Bordeaux and the rest in equal numbers through 
St. Nazaire and Brest. As it worked out, practically all the 
overseas soldiers returned through these three ports, although 
a few sailed from Marseilles, Le Havre, and La Pallice. The 
division of work, however, did not materialize as planned. 
Bordeaux handled less than its fifth of the forces, and the 
embarkations at St. Nazaire were not much larger than those 
at Bordeaux. The great mass of the A. E. F. came back via 
Brest, and at Brest was set up the largest installation for the 
embarkation of passengers the world had ever seen. 

The troops of the A. E. F. were of two general sorts — those 
of the line organized by divisions, corps, and armies, also 
known as combat troops, and those of supply, who conducted 
the thousand and one enterprises necessary to the maintenance 
of a force as large as the A. E. F. three thousand miles away 
from home. The two sorts of troops were not evenly balanced 
in number, the combat troops being considerably the more 

* In this the system differed from that in use in the United States. Not 
the Quartermaster Corps but the Embarkation Service in the United States 
prepared the overseas troops for the voyage and embarked them on the trans- 
ports. The Embarkation Service also operated many of the transports. After the 
armistice the Embarkation Service, novt^ merged into the Transportation Service, 
continued to manage the Army's ocean shipping facilities, and it also attended 
to the details of debarking troops at the ports in this country; but its juris- 
diction over those troops began only after they had boarded the ships in 
France. 




Photo by Signal Corp 



CAMP STREET IN LE MANS AREA 




Photo by Signal Corps 



BATH HOUSE AT BREST 




Photo by Howard E. Coffin 



IN CAMP PONTANEZEN 




Photo by Signal Corps 

COMPANY STREET IN PONTANEZEN 



THE A. E. F. EMBARKS 13 

numerous. It was evident that their embarkation offered 
separate problems. 

With the combat troops mass travel could be conducted at 
its greatest efficiency. The divisional troops were homogeneous, 
their transportation needs were essentially alike, and a single 
order could control the movements of tens of thousands of 
them at once. The supply troops, on the other hand, were 
heterogeneous. They were organized in thousands of units of 
varying sizes and kinds. Many of them, particularly officers, 
were serving in the organization as individuals attached to no 
particular units. The travel problems of these various elements 
differed widely. Therefore it was decided to handle the embar- 
kation of divisional troops and supply troops separately. The 
general demobilization plan adopted about the middle of 
December, 1918, provided for the establishment of a great 
embarkation center for the divisional troops — an area which 
should be convenient to all three ports of embarkation, in 
which area the combat troops in their large units could be pre- 
pared for the overseas voyage, and from which they could go 
directly to the ships without pausing in the embarkation cities. 
The installations at the ports themselves were to be used 
especially in the embarkation of supply troops. 

At Le Mans, a spot about midway between Paris and the 
Biscay coast, the A. E. F. possessed a plant that might be 
expanded quickly to serve as the divisional embarkation 
center. When the great flood of American troops began de- 
bouching upon French soil in the early summer of 1918 it 
became evident to the command of the expedition that it 
needed an area in which the incoming divisions might assemble 
as their units debarked from the transports and where they 
might rest while their ranks were being built up to prescribed 
strength by the addition of replacements. By this time, too, the 
system of supplying replacement troops to the A. E. F. had 
become automatic. The replacements were the only American 
soldiers who crossed to France without definite objective. 
They were to be used in France as the A. E. F. needed them to 
fill up its divisional ranks. It was necessary, therefore, to pro- 



14 DEMOBILIZATION 

vide a reservoir upon which the depleted combat divisions 
could draw for replacements. Le Mans was selected as the site 
of this reservoir and also as the assembling point for the de- 
barking organized divisions. The Le Mans area before the 
armistice was known as the A. E. F.'s classification and re- 
placement camp. 

The reasons which brought about the selection of Le Mans 
as the site for the replacement and divisional depot served 
also to make the place the ideal location for the expedition's 
embarkation center. Le Mans was at the junction of trunk- 
line railroads leading to Brest, St. Nazaire, and Bordeaux. 
It also possessed good railroad connections with Paris and with 
the front, which in the summer of 1918 had been advanced 
by the Germans until it was close to the metropolitan limits 
of Paris and was therefore not far from Le Mans. The depot 
was established in July, 1918, when the Eighty- third Division 
occupied the area as its depot division. At that time the depot 
as projected contemplated the construction of eight divisional 
camps, each to accommodate 26,000 men, and two forward- 
ing camps, one with accommodations for 25,000 men and the 
other for 15,000. In other words, the camp eventually was to 
accommodate a quarter of a million troops. No military center 
in the United States compared in size with this project. 

At the time of the armistice the development of Le Mans 
had made good progress. It could then maintain about 120,- 
000 troops. On December 14, when Le Mans was officially 
designated as the embarkation center, its capacity had been 
increased to 200,000. Shortly after the armistice began, its 
transient population jumped to 100,000, and it never fell 
below this mark until the late spring of 1919, when the greater 
part of the combat divisions of the A. E. F. had embarked for 
the United States. 

The Le Mans center had the duty of completely preparing 
for embarkation all troops received in the area. Theoretically 
every man who passed through Le Mans was prepared to go 
directly to a transport. This meant bathing and delousing for 
every man who came to the camp, inspecting his equipment 



THE A. E. F. EMBARKS 15 

and supplying new clothing and other personal articles if he 
needed them, and perfecting his service records so that he 
might encounter no difficulty in securing his final pay and 
discharge in the United States. To do this important work 
quickly and well, it was necessary to operate an institution 
of impressive size. 

The dimensions of the whole camp were tremendous. There 
was nothing like it in the United States. A man could walk 
briskly for an hour in a single direction at Le Mans and see 
nothing but tents, barracks, drill fields, and troops lined up 
for preliminary or final inspections. The task of feeding this 
city full of guests was so great that the camp administration 
found it economical to build a narrow-gauge railroad system 
connecting the kitchens with the warehouses. Food moved up 
to the camp cookstoves by the trainload, and the same loco- 
motives that brought the supplies hauled away the refuse. A 
whole adjacent forest was cut down to supply firewood. When 
the Americans occupied the section there were no adequate 
switching facilities, nor were there storage accommodations.' 
The Quartermaster Corps, which operated the storage project, 
cleared a field in the midst of a wood and used the clearing 
for an open storage space (the surrounding trees giving a 
degree of shelter), connecting the place with the railroad by 
constructing a spur track. Thereafter, even after great ware- 
houses had been built in the clearing and it had become the 
supply depot for the entire camp, requiring the services of 
6,000 troops in its operation, the place was known to the camp 
as "The Spur." As an addition to this storage, smaller covered 
warehouses were provided at all the divisional sub-depots. At 
one time the corrals of the camp contained 10,000 horses and 
mules. In one week in February, 1919, nearly 32,000 troops 
arrived in camp, a fact indicating the rate at which troops 
passed through to embarkation. The Quartermaster Corps 
opened two great central commissaries that were in effect de- 
partment stores. The camp operated a large laundry, a shoe 
repair shop, a clothing repair shop, and numerous other indus- 
trial plants. 



i6 DEMOBILIZATION 

The equipment installed at Le Mans was duplicated in 
smaller scale at the three embarkation ports. Yet even these 
port installations could not be called small. Camp Pontanezen 
at Brest could give accommodations to 80,000 men at once. 
The largest embarkation camps in the United States were 
smaller than this. There were thirteen smaller camps and mili- 
tary post3 at Brest. The two embarkation camps at Bordeaux 
could house 22,000 men, but there were billeting accommoda- 
tions in the district for thousands of others. The construction at 
St. Nazaire was considerably larger than that at Bordeaux, but 
not so extensive as that at Brest. 

Most of these camps were built after the armistice, and the 
engineer constructors and the embarking troops elbowed each 
other as embarkation and construction proceeded simultane- 
ously. Some of the camps had served as rest camps prior to the 
armistice, but these had to be greatly enlarged and improved 
in equipment before they could give adequate service as em- 
barkation camps. The weather along the northwestern coast 
of France is intensely uncomfortable and disagreeable to 
Americans. In the winter and spring especially, the rains and 
mists are almost incessant. It was not always possible to choose 
ideal sites for the embarkation camps in France. The sites had 
to be near the ports, and in the thickly inhabited countryside 
the American authorities were forced to accept whatsoever 
areas they could get, without being too insistent upon such fine 
points as natural drainage and pleasant surroundings. 

This statement is particularly applicable to Pontanezen, 
which was pitched on high but poorly drained ground. Ordi- 
narily the Army would not have occupied such a location 
without first making permanent improvements. The continual 
rains, the lack of strong drainage, and the heavy traflSc of men, 
animals, and trucks combined to make the Pontanezen site in 
1919 a morass of quaking mud. Only the strongest of emer- 
gencies justified its use. Because of the daily cost of maintain- 
ing the A. E. F. and because the expeditionary soldiers them- 
selves wished to return home as soon as possible, regardless of 
the conditions of their travel, it was decided to make use of 



THE A. E. F. EMBARKS 17 

these port camps even while they were being constructed, 
instead of holding up the whole movement until the camp 
arrangements could be made perfect. 

Tales of suffering among our soldiers at Pontanezen came 
to the United States and were even aired on the floors of Con- 
gress, but the suffering alleged was more apparent than real. 
Those who went through the experience of residence in Pon- 
tanezen, even at its worst, were not injured in health. Despite 
appearances, the camp's sanitary arrangements were of high 
merit. The medical records of Camp Pontanezen show that its 
sickness and death rates, leaving the domestic epidemic of 
influenza altogether out of the comparison, were as low as 
those of the best camps in the United States. 

In the spring of 1919 most of the construction work at the 
embarkation camps was complete, and they became more com- 
fortable. The camps consisted of miles of one-story, tar- 
papered, rough-board buildings connected with wooden side- 
walks of duck-boards. Pontanezen was a complete American 
city set down amid the quaint roads of old Brittany. It had 
newspapers, banks, theatres, stores, public libraries, restau- 
rants, hospitals, churches, telephones, and electric lights, and 
even a narrow-gauge railway for freighting about its supplies. 
The entire American military population in the camps at Brest 
quite outnumbered the French inhabitants of the region. The 
water system installed by the Engineers to serve all the Ameri- 
can establishments at the port was sufficient for the city of 
150,000 people. There was a special camp for casual officers. 
A section of this camp was set aside for the French, English, 
Belgian, and Italian wives that American soldiers had married 
abroad. There was a hospital camp, a camp for the white 
troops on permanent duty at the port, and another for colored 
troops so assigned. There were numerous small camps for labor 
battalions, and a special camp for engineer and motor trans- 
port organizations. Not far away was a large German prison 
camp. 

In one important respect embarkation in France differed 
from what it had been in the United States. It was extremely 



i8 DEMOBILIZATION 

necessary to rid the home-coming troops of body vermin before 
placing them on the ships. The delousing process at our French 
ports of embarkation was the most thorough experienced by 
the doughboy during his foreign service, and this process 
chiefly distinguished embarkation abroad from that which the 
soldier had known at Hoboken and Newport News. 

Our forebears shared none of the modern aversion to dis- 
cussion of the louse. One of the great monarchs of France set 
the stamp of his royal approval upon scratching publicly when 
one itched, and Robert Bums once addressed a poem to a 
louse. The louse, however, cannot survive American habits of 
personal cleanliness; and, justly enough, the insect has become 
associated with filth and has dropped out of polite conversa- 
tion. The war revived the fame of this parasite. An inspection 
at one time revealed the fact that 90 per cent of the American 
troops at the front were infested. These men naturally wrote 
home about it, and then the louse, euphemized as "cootie," 
became a national figure. 

There was a serious aspect to the situation, however, that 
the military authorities could not overlook. Besides being a 
source of discomfort, the louse is the sole carrier of one of the 
most dread diseases that afflict mankind — typhus fever. In 
bygone times typhus was known variously as army fever, camp 
fever, or jail fever. It was particularly prevalent in this 
country at the time of the Revolution, and it existed to some 
extent here during the Civil War — an indication of what must 
have been the condition of individual American soldiers in 
those days. Typhus exists to-day practically as an endemic on 
the central plateau of Mexico, the range of the disease touch- 
ing the border of the United States. The disease cannot invade 
this country, however, because of the lack of carriers. But if 
the A. E. F. had returned to the United States with its 
2,000,000 men lice-infested, the demobilized soldiers might 
have distributed typhus carriers from one end of the country 
to the other and exposed the nation to a terrible menace. 

The sanitary regulations of the A. E. F. kept typhus away 
from the troops by controlling the lice. The Quartermaster 



THE A. E. F. EMBARKS 19 

Corps operated a number of mobile delousing plants just be- 
hind the front lines and in the billeting areas to the rear. It 
is interesting to note that these plants had to be camouflaged 
because the airmen of the enemy sometimes mistook them for 
batteries of artillery and directed gunfire upon them. As these 
plants increased in number and efficiency they reduced the 
lousiness of the combat troops to a scant 3 per cent. 

As long as our troops remained in France largely billeted on 
the French population, it was unlikely that the field sanitary 
measures could extinguish the louse altogether; but the com- 
mand of the expedition determined that at the ports of embar- 
kation the American doughboy should bid good-bye to P. 
vestimenti forever. The importance of completely delousing 
the troops was emphasized in the same G. H. Q. memorandum 
that had set up the embarkation system. 

In pursuance of this policy every embarkation camp in 
France was established in two isolated sections. One section 
was known as the "dirty" camp and the other as the "clean" 
camp. Upon arrival from the front the troops first took quar- 
ters in the "dirty" camp. Between the two sections lay the 
buildings in which the camp administration conducted all the 
various processes of preparing soldiers for embarkation for 
the United States. One of the most important of these activi- 
ties was bathing and delousing the troops. As far as scientific 
measures could prevent it, not a louse was permitted to cross 
from the "dirty" camp to the "clean" camp. The measures 
were highly effective. Only a few men were found to be in- 
fested upon arrival in America. For these there were final 
delousing facilities at all our debarkation camps. When the 
overseas veterans took trains for home at the Atlantic ports 
they were completely verminless. The medical officers at the 
demobilization centers in this country failed to discover a 
single exception. 

The embarkation plant at Bordeaux was known to return- 
ing soldiers as "The Mill." Its processes were typical of those 
at all the embarkation camps in France. The Bordeaux mill 
ground swiftly, yet ground exceeding fine. To it came the 



20 DEMOBILIZATION 

raw material — dirty, ragged, weary humanity. It reached out 
for this material, whirled it into its machinery, and a little 
while later delivered from the other end its finished product — 
clean, well-clothed, deloused, and comfortable American sol- 
diers, their service records compiled up to the minute, Ameri- 
can money in their pockets, and a mighty self-respect swelling 
their chests. 

To France America sent the best clothed and best equipped 
army that had ever stepped on European soil. The two million 
men arrived in France outfitted almost completely in new 
clothing and equipment which they had received in the Ameri- 
can embarkation camps just before they boarded the trans- 
ports. In 1919 we brought home the first American army that 
had ever fought in a great war and returned in anything but 
rags. By special act Congress gave permission to each dis- 
charged soldier to keep his uniform and certain other equip- 
ment when he returned to civilian life. Even though, for most 
of the men coming up into the embarkation ports in France, 
their final discharge was only a few weeks away, nevertheless 
the military organization there saw to it that every man was 
decently clad before he began the return voyage, and this often 
meant the issue of entirely new articles. The Quartermaster 
Corps abroad wanted to win from the folks at home the ver- 
dict, when they had looked over their restored boys — "Guess 
they took pretty good care of you over there, after all." 

The "mill" at Bordeaux was housed in a long, low hut with 
separate departments for the chief operations necessary to the 
preparation of troops for embarkation, the steps being ar- 
ranged progressively. At the entrance end were the executive 
offices. Here the soldier, as he passed through, received his 
service records, withdrawn from his company's files, and also 
a Red Cross bag in which to carry his personal trinkets and his 
record cards and papers on the journey through the "mill." 
Next he came to the records inspection section, where officers 
perfected the entries in his record. Here he also received a 
copy of the orders under which his unit was traveling, his pay 
card, and a card known as the individual equipment record. On 



THE A. E. F. EMBARKS 



21 



the equipment card appeared the printed names of all articles 
which a completely outfitted American soldier should wear or 
carry wherever he went. Next the soldier stood before an 
inspector who examined the worn equipment, noted wherein 
it was incomplete, labeled any damaged or worn-out articles 
for discard and salvage, and checked on the equipment card 
such new articles as should be issued to the soldier later on. 
The standard equipment of each returning soldier was as 
follows : 



1 Barrack Bag 

2 Undershirts 

2 Pairs of Drawers 
2 Pairs of Socks 

1 Pair of O. D. Gloves 

2 O. D. Shirts 

1 Pair of Shoes 
1 Pair of Laces 
1 Pair of Breeches 
1 O. D. Coat 
1 Overseas Cap 
1 Pair of Leggins 
1 Chevron (for noncom- 
missioned officers) 
1 Shelter Half 

3 Blankets 
1 Overcoat 
1 Slicker 

1 Shaving Brush 

1 Toothbrush 

1 Tube Tooth Paste 



1 Comb 

1 Piece of Shaving Soap 

1 Towel 

1 Cake of Soap 

2 Identification Tags 
1 Belt 

1 Razor 

1 Ammunition Belt 

1 Pack Carrier 

1 Haversack 

1 Canteen 

1 Canteen Cover 

1 Condiment Can 

1 Meat Can 

1 Cup 

1 Knife 

1 Fork 

1 Spoon 

1 First Aid Pouch 

1 First Aid Packet 



The soldier next went to the disrobing room, where he 
divested himself of all clothing except his shoes, which he 
was to carry through with him. The cootie would not cling to 
leather. Then he passed on to a medical examination for infec- 
tious disease. If he passed this safely, he proceeded to the 
bathing department, where, under the watchful eyes of a ser- 



22 DEMOBILIZATION 

geant, he soaped and scrubbed himself thoroughly, first in a 
hot shower bath and then in a cold one. Experience had taught 
that the greatest enemy of the louse was plain soap and water 
and plenty of it. Meanwhile certain of his discarded garments, 
if they were in good condition or if they could be repaired for 
future wear, had been sent from the disrobing room to the 
steam sterilizer in another part of the building. The steriliza- 
tion process took thirty minutes, which was just about the 
time it took the soldier to go through the "mill." 

Scrubbed and clean, the soldier went from the bath into 
another room where doctors examined him for diseases of the 
throat, lungs, and skin. After that, the barber shop and a hair 
cut. The barber shop at the "mill" was equipped with fifty 
chairs. 

At last the object of these official attentions reached his 
goal, the equipment room. What he had feared in the process 
were the two medical inspections, either of which might stop 
his progress instanter and send him scurrying to a camp hos- 
pital for observation or treatment. In either circumstance, his 
embarkation would be deferred indefinitely. But if he were 
allowed to reach the equipment room, he knew he was safe. 
Here he found great bins containing large quantities of the 
articles named on the equipment card. As he passed the bins 
every soldier received clean socks and underclothing, new tape 
for his identification tags and a clean shelter half in which to 
carry his equipment. He also received such new articles as 
were checked on his equipment card. 

In the dressing room beyond, he found waiting for him a 
uniform and the serviceable portions of the outfit he had 
brought with him to the "mill," all the textile articles having 
been thoroughly deloused and sterilized. He found his old 
uniform, if that had been in good condition ; otherwise, a new 
one or a respectable one from the repair factory. Sometimes his 
old uniform came back shrunken and faded by the hot steam 
of the delousing plant. In that event a serviceable uniform was 
substituted for it. 

The final station in the "mill" was the pay office. It some- 




Photo by Signal Corps 

1. ENTERING "MILL" AT BORDEAUX 




Photo by Signal Corps 

2. RECEIVING CLEAN CLOTHING IN "MILL' 




Photo by Signal Corps 



3. THE "MILL" BARBERSHOP 




Photo by Signal Ccr/'S 

4. THROUGH "MILL" AND READY FOR HOME 



THE A. E. F. EMBARKS 23 

times happened that troops came up for embarkation with 
their pay months in arrears. Now, with his records perfected, 
the soldier received all his back pay. Thanks to the exchange 
system set up by the A. E. F. in the embarkation camps, he 
received his pay in American money, perhaps the first he had 
seen in many months. The "feel" of the familiar bills and the 
jingle of the silver were like a taste of home. Clean, neatly 
clothed, restored once more to man's estate, the soldier emerged 
from the "mill" and made his way to quarters in the "clean" 
camp, his heart light because he knew now that he was going 
home "toot sweet." The sense of well-being moved one soldier- 
poet to praise of the "mill" as follows: 

"Ye go in one end dirty, broke, 
So dog tired ye can't see a joke. 
Ye come out paid, an' plum' remade, 
A self-respectin' soldier." 

The embarkation plant at Bordeaux, if pressed, could 
cleanse, delouse, equip, and otherwise prepare for the home 
voyage 180,000 men in a month. During the busy times in 
1919 a continuous column of men filed through the depart- 
ments. They went through in blocks of twelve. In each of the 
various departments were ten booths, each accommodating 
twelve men. 

The processes at the other embarkation camps were essen- 
tially the same. In each of the Le Mans divisional camps was 
installed a bathing and delousing plant with a capacity of 
1,200 men an hour. For the sterilization of clothing in the 
area there were three large central "disinfesting" plants, five 
smaller stationary steam sterilizers, and more than a dozen 
mobile sterilizers. 

The two port camps at Bordeaux were known as Camp 
Neuve and Camp Genicart. After the armistice these two 
camps were reorganized and enlarged. Camp Neuve became 
the "dirty" or entrance camp. It accommodated 5,400 men. 
Camp Genicart was designated as the "clean" or evacuation 
camp, and its barracks could house nearly 17,000 men. The 



24 DEMOBILIZATION 

busiest day for Bordeaux was Sunday, May ii, 1919, when 
6,399 ^^^ passed through the "mill" and made ready to em- 
bark. St. Nazaire handled 15,306 embarkations on June 17, 
1919, its record day. 

Salvage was an important operation at all the embarkation 
points in France. Thousands of articles of apparel discarded 
by the returning troops were not so worn but that they could 
be made serviceable again. The salvage plant at Le Mans 
could repair 1,700 pairs of shoes, dry-clean, sterilize, and re- 
pair 4,000 pieces of clothing, wash 10,000 garments in the 
laundry, and disinfect 10,000 blankets every day. The plant 
occupied eight buildings, and the average value of clothing 
repaired monthly was over $150,000. There were salvage 
plants also at Brest, St. Nazaire, and Bordeaux, the one at 
Brest being of great size. 

The task of feeding men at the embarkation camps gave the 
Quartermaster Corps one of its chief problems. Each divisional 
sub-depot at Le Mans carried at all times sufficient food to 
supply the appetites of 25,000 men for fifteen days, and in 
addition the central warehouses contained 500,000 emergency 
rations to substitute for the garrison rations if anything went 
wrong with the food supply. In December, 1918, the subsist- 
ence services in the area had been built up to the capacity of 
500,000 rations cooked and served each day. 

At Brest also the feeding arrangements were laid out on an 
immense scale. The men ate food prepared in standard 
kitchens, each capable of providing subsistence for thousands. 
The cold-storage and other storage spaces of one of the stand- 
ard kitchens were large enough to hold such items as 10,000 
pounds of beef and 6,000 pounds of bread. The kitchen facili- 
ties included a meat cutting room, a tool room, a scullery, a 
garbage incinerator, a great mess hall, and finally the galleys, 
each of which contained four large hotel ranges with work- 
tables, serving tables, and all necessary cooking utensils. Ten 
men did the cooking in each galley. Each mess hall was 280 
feet long. End to end, its metal topped tables measured 495 



THE A. E. F. EMBARKS 25 

feet in length. Galleys, storage rooms, and mess halls had 
cement floors. The whole plant was illuminated by electricity. 

Each mess hall at Brest was operated on the cafeteria plan. 
Each was equipped to feed 20,000 soldiers. The men entered 
the hall marching in column of squads. They passed through 
the galleys, filling their kits with hot food, then secured places 
at the tables, ate, and left the hall at the opposite end, where 
there were refuse cans in which to scrape off their dishes and 
also tanks of boiling, soapy water and hot rinsing water. Here 
they cleaned their equipment. The facilities were such that 
each kitchen could serve a brigade of troops entering the build- 
ing at the ordinary marching pace. Frequent inspections kept 
the food up to standard. The camps at Brest also maintained 
night soup stands at which any soldier could get bread and hot 
soup between the hours of 8 : 30 p.m. and 2 : 30 a.m. The force 
that operated the messing facilities at Brest numbered 1,600 
officers and men. 

At Bordeaux the troops temporarily occupying the embarka- 
tion camps cooked their own meals at the mess halls, drawing 
their supplies from the camp organization. At St. Nazaire the 
messes were similar to those at Brest. The old army transport 
McClellan^ which had crossed to France in the first American 
convoy in 1917, was stationed at St. Nazaire, where it served 
the subsistence organization as a floating refrigerator with 
capacity for 3,000,000 pounds of food. The McClellan was 
too old to stand the buffeting of the North Atlantic, and the 
Embarkation Service, unwilling to risk bringing her home, 
turned the ship over to the A. E. F. After the expedition had 
returned to the United States the Government sold the Mc- 
Clellan to France. 

To the individual soldier, quite the most important branch 
of the embarkation organization was that one which paid the 
money due him from the Government. It paid him his money 
in francs, either in the currency itself or by check, and then saw 
to it that he exchanged his French money for its equivalent in 
American currency. Both of these enterprises in finance — dis- 
bursement and exchange — were in the hands of the A. E. F. 



26 DEMOBILIZATION 

Quartermaster Corps. The disbursement offered little diffi- 
culty, although the monthly pay roll at Brest sometimes con- 
tained as many as 100,000 names, while those at St. Nazaire 
and Bordeaux were proportionately large. The question of 
foreign exchange presented more of a problem. 

Soon after the van of the A. E. F. reached France the Treas- 
ury Department at Washington requested the War Depart- 
ment to pay all its troops on foreign soil in the money of the 
country in which they chanced to be stationed. This meant that 
most of the men of the expedition received their pay in francs. 
Before the armistice, questions of currency exchange were of 
slight concern to the overseas soldier. After the Government 
had deducted his allotment to his dependents, his monthly 
premium payment for war risk insurance, and his partial 
payment for any Liberty Bonds he might have purchased 
through the Army, there was not much left for him, anyhow. 
When francs were cheaper he received more of them from the 
pay officer than he had expected, but as long as he stayed in 
France and spent his money there the rate of exchange made 
little difference to him. 

French exchange continually strengthened during the so- 
journ of the expedition in France — until after the armistice 
began. The normal value of francs is 5.18 to the dollar. In 
July, 1917, the rate was 5.70. This rate gradually improved 
until at its strongest point it stood at 5.45. The few wounded 
men and casuals returning to the United States during this 
period were thus able to benefit financially by exchanging 
their French savings for American currency. 

After the armistice, however, and during the very time the 
expeditionary troops were returning to the United States in 
greatest numbers, the exchange value of the franc slumped 
badly. Shortly after November 11, 1918, the rate was 5.80 
to 1. It continued to fall steadily until in the autumn of 1919 
it took 9.70 francs to purchase one dollar. It follows that the 
provident soldier who had saved the francs paid to him on a 
basis of less than six to the dollar lost heavily when he was 
forced to convert his savings back into dollars again on a basis 



THE A. E. F. EMBARKS 27 

of nearly ten francs to the dollar. The loss was particularly- 
heavy upon officers who maintained drawing and savings ac- 
counts in French banks or who had not cashed their pay checks. 
Sometimes, too, officers lost their checks. Later they obtained 
duplicates, which the declining exchange had made less valu- 
able. The War Department considered itself bound to protect 
soldiers from losses on this account. Congress is now consider- 
ing a war department bill which, if enacted into law, will pro- 
vide for the reimbursement of losses incurred by soldiers be- 
cause of variations in foreign exchange. 

It was good financial policy for the A. E. F. to leave all 
its French currency behind as it embarked for the United 
States, and to bring home only American money. Yet it would 
have resulted in confusion in the A. E. F. finances to have 
changed the pay system at the ports of embarkation. Therefore 
the Quartermaster Corps did the next best thing : it paid off the 
embarking troops in francs as usual and then immediately 
converted their francs into American currency. Since both pay- 
ment and exchange were at the same rate of exchange, there 
was no loss to the troops in this transaction. 

In order to provide the American money for this exchange 
it was necessary for the Treasury to ship to France great quan- 
tities of currency. It took the A. E. F. some time to convince 
the Treasury Department of the necessity for such shipments. 
The day after the armistice began, the command of the A. E. F. 
cabled to the Treasury requesting the immediate shipment 
of $500,000 in currency, an order afterwards increased to 
$2,000,000. This money did not actually reach the A. E. F. 
until the last day of January, 1919. By that date the expedi- 
tion was beginning to embark rapidly. There was not enough 
American currency in Europe to buy all the French money of 
the expeditionary troops, and only by the most strenuous 
efforts could the Quartermaster Corps provide money for ex- 
change until the first shipment of currency arrived from the 
United States. Finance officers were stationed in Paris, Lon- 
don, and at the principal seaports with orders to buy all the 
American money they could secure. By combing the banks and 



28 DEMOBILIZATION 

the countingrooms of brokers and by maintaining in Paris a 
fund from which shipments were rushed by motor convoys to 
the ports as these exhausted their supplies of currency, the 
Corps managed to keep the exchange system running. After 
the January shipment of $2,000,000 the Treasury Depart- 
ment arranged for an automatic supply of $10,000,000 every 
month. 

Meanwhile, at the ports the Corps had built up the exchange 
plan. Booths were set up on all docks, and a force of disbursing 
quartermasters was organized to go on board all transports and 
exchange the money of soldiers who had failed to make the 
exchange on shore. The A. E. F. passed an order making it 
compulsory for all soldiers to exchange their cash before sail- 
ing. Notices to this effect were posted conspicuously in all 
the embarkation camps. In the larger units the officers attended 
to the matter, collecting the French money from their men, 
receiving American money for it from the exchange officers, 
and then distributing the familiar currency among the troops. 
Individuals and men traveling in small units attended to their 
own exchange. The quartermasters at Brest distributed as 
much as $400,000 in American currency in a single day. Up 
to July 1 Brest had paid out $60,000,000 in American money 
to troops boarding ship there. 

By the late spring of 1919 most of the combat divisions, 
except those on active duty with the Army of Occupation, had 
crossed the ocean or had started for home. By that time the 
facilities at the base ports had been developed to a capacity 
that enabled them to handle all further embarkations, and the 
command of the expedition closed and abandoned the embar- 
kation center at Le Mans. All of the physical equipment there 
went to the French Government under the terms of the general 
sale consummated in August of that year. On June 30 Bor- 
deaux was closed as a port of embarkation. It had embarked 
258,000 troops. St. Nazaire officially ceased to exist as a port 
of embarkation on July 26, although thereafter it embarked 
a few casuals. Approximately 500,000 American soldiers said 
farewell to France at St. Nazaire. 



THE A. E. F. EMBARKS 29 

A million and a quarter American expeditionary soldiers 
departed from Brest for the United States. Brest was the last 
of the ports to close. The embarkation of the millionth Ameri- 
can at Brest seemed almost as momentous as the arrival of the 
millionth American in France a year earlier. In August Gen- 
eral Pershing and the historic First Division sailed from Brest, 
and the last of the combat troops had gone. On October 1 
American troops were stationed in France only at Brest and 
in Paris, but Brest continued in operation as the port of em- 
barkation until the last American had departed. On October 
1 there were a few thousand men still to sail, but the A. E. F. 
no longer existed in France. Its headquarters had moved to 
Washington. The great task was done. 



CHAPTER III 
THE TRANSATLANTIC FERRY 

ON the first day of the armistice, before Washington 
knew its exact terms or could form an estimate of 
how great a force we should have to maintain in 
France pending the conclusion of permanent peace, General 
Frank T. Hines, the Chief of the Embarkation Service, which 
had administered the great work of transporting the 2,000,- 
000 men of the A. E. F. to France and had carried nearly half 
of them across the ocean in its own ships, placed before the 
Secretary of War a plan for the return of the troops. 

It can be said that the outlook for the speedy repatriation 
of the overseas soldiers was not bright. It had taken nearly 
seventeen months to transport the expedition to Europe, and 
more than half of the men had crossed in the ships of other 
nations. England had been the chief contributor of tonnage to 
our overseas movement prior to November 1 1. To build up on 
the western front the numerical superiority that was the chief 
factor in the victory, the British Empire combed the seas for 
suitable passenger ships, cut her own civilian requirements to 
the minimum, and devoted to our transport service every ton 
of troop-carrying capacity she could procure. France and Italy 
had each supplied a few vessels. 

With the immense fleet thus assembled the War Depart- 
ment transported men across the Atlantic with an intense con- 
centration of effort never before known. First in the determi- 
nation that the Germans should not conquer, later in the 
assurance that we ourselves should win, the Department 
shipped the troops over with scarcely a thought of how they 
were going to get back again. Future events were to be allowed 
to take care of themselves. 




Photo by Signal Corl's 



KITCHENS AT LE MANS 




Photo by Signal Corps 



STREET IN LE MANS AREA NO. 5 




Photo by Signal Corps 

CASUALS ON TRANSPORT LEAVING BREST 




Photo by Signal Corps 

BOARDING TRANSPORT FROM LIGHTERS, BREST 



THE TRANSATLANTIC FERRY 31 

Now such events had come to pass. England, faced with the 
sudden necessity of returning her own colonial soldiers to their 
native lands, and looking ahead, too, to the restoration of her 
all-important foreign commerce, immediately withdrew her 
tonnage from our service. France and Italy did likewise. The 
magnificent "bridge of ships" on which the American Expedi- 
tion had crossed the Atlantic melted away, and 2,000,000 
Americans found themselves partially marooned in a strange 
land. 

Yet not completely marooned. The fleet of American-flag 
troopships assembled during the war had on the day of the 
armistice a one-trip capacity of 112,000 military passengers. 
Operated in armed and guarded convoys, this shipping could 
not quite average one round-trip transatlantic voyage a month; 
its transporting capacity under war conditions was somewhere 
in the neighborhood of 1 00,000 troops a month. The armistice 
did away with the need of steaming in convoy and allowed 
the transports to be operated by the much more efficient sys- 
tem of individual sailings. Under such conditions the monthly 
capacity of the American-flag fleet was about 150,000 men. 
This capacity was to be discounted somewhat by the fact that 
practically all of the vessels had reached a point of having to 
be retired for a season of reconditioning and repair. It was 
evident that, unless this fleet were aided, it would take it, 
under the most favorable conditions, over a year to bring home 
the A. E. F. ; and it was likelier that, actually, the spring of 
1920 would be at hand before the last of the overseas soldiers 
set foot once more on their native soil. General Hines's plan 
provided for such aid. It discounted in advance the subsequent 
fact that the Allies withdrew their passenger ships, and turned 
to our own resources for increased transport capacity. 

It appeared that we should have considerable tonnage avail- 
able for such use — tonnage released by the armistice from 
other service. For one source, there was the Navy. Its battle- 
ships and cruisers variously had been protecting the coast, 
convoying transports, and holding themselves ready in the 
combined Grand Fleet to meet the expected German naval 



32 DEMOBILIZATION 

attack in force. These duties had come to an end. The Hines 
plan contemplated the temporary conversion of a number of 
war vessels into troop carriers by the installation of berths and 
messing accommodations. Although all foreign tonnage was 
to be withdrawn at once, the Transportation Service hoped to 
secure some additional capacity by chartering passenger vessels 
from foreign owners under new arrangements. 

The most promising source of new capacity, however, lay 
in the fleet of army cargo transports which, on the day of the 
armistice, represented about 2,500,000 deadweight tonnage* 
in the aggregate. The armistice immediately rendered a great 
part of this tonnage no longer necessary to the Government in 
the maintenance of a vast overseas supply service. The A. E. F. 
was thereafter to exist on a garrison basis, requiring only the 
ordinary garrison supplies of food and clothing. The great 
cargoes of ordnance and aircraft, of raw steel and semi- 
finished materials for the French and English munitions plants, 
of horses and mules, of railway and engineering supplies — 
the tonnage which had laden the cargo fleet in the past and had 
heaped up at the Atlantic terminals — were to cross the ocean 
no more. It was proposed to take the best of the cargo trans- 
ports and convert them immediately into troopships. 

The War Department adopted the entire plan, and the first 
act of the Transportation Service was to begin a survey of the 
cargo fleet to determine what vessels were most suitable for 
conversion. Only the larger and faster boats would serve, and 
of course they had to be ships with holds adapted to the instal- 
lation of troop quarters. Specialized vessels, such as tankers 
and ore carriers, would not do. 

For the Transportation Service the armistice was but an 
episode. It merely changed the character of its work and added 
to the volume of it. The peak of the operations curve, so far as 
troop transportation was concerned, was not reached until 
eight months after the armistice had been in effect. The thou- 
sands of troops in the Transportation Service yearned for dis- 

* Deadweight tonnage represents the weight of cargo it takes to sink a 
vessel in the water from her light-load line to her deep-load line. 



THE TRANSATLANTIC FERRY 33 

charge and home as ardently as did the rest of the Army; yet 
these men realized that it would be months before their work 
could end. Meanwhile they would have to see hundreds of 
thousands proceeding to demobilization camps as rapidly as 
steamships and trains could carry them, with never a thought 
of the transportation men who had made their early discharge 
possible. 

The resulting drop in morale was one difficulty which the 
Transportation Service faced at the outset of its labors in 
demobilization, but one which it met and solved successfully. 
Another more concrete one had to do with the operation of 
troopships. Early in the war the Army had turned over to the 
Navy the task of operating most of the troopships at sea, prin- 
cipally because the military authorities found themselves unable 
to compete with the high wages of the munitions industries in 
securing civilian crews for vessels. The Navy, with the uniform 
it offered and its appeal to patriotism, had no such trouble ; and 
consequently it assumed the operation of the troop transports 
and manned them with bluejackets. These young Americans 
enlisted for danger and adventure and had no stomach for the 
work of operating a collection of prosaic ferry-boats across the 
now safe Atlantic. The Navy Department, seeing that it could 
not hold them in service, notified the War Department to take 
back its ships. This the Transportation Service did, hiring 
civilian crews and placing them aboard the troop transports at 
a rate that relieved the Navy of the work entirely by the sum- 
mer of 1919, except that the Navy continued to operate three 
or four troopships with crews made up of men serving under 
term enlistments. 

While the Transportation Service was contemplating the 
conversion of many of its cargo carriers into troopships and 
the consequent use of the vessels for a number of months to 
come, it was subjected to pressure from the owners of some of 
these same ships, who demanded that the Government give 
them up. Practically all of its cargo tonnage the Army held 
under charter from private ownership, the charters running 
during the emergency. After the armistice the vessel owners 



34 DEMOBILIZATION 

naturally desired to get back into the race for foreign com- 
merce. It was to the interest of the United States that the mili- 
tary tonnage be so employed at the earliest possible time, but 
the early return of the overseas expedition was even more 
important, and it received the priority. 

Another obstacle in the way of carrying out the Service's 
demobilization plan swiftly and efficiently was the congested 
condition of the American shipyards, practically all of which 
were engaged to the limits of their capacities in new construc- 
tion for the Emergency Fleet Corporation. This congestion not 
only hampered the project to convert the cargo vessels into 
troop carriers, but it also strung out the necessary work of 
overhauling the regular troop transports already in c(^mmis- 
sion. For over a year these vessels had been driven mercilessly 
through fair weather and foul, with never a let-up for the 
general repairing and reconditioning which every ship needs 
at intervals. Large forces had been carried on all of them as 
part of the crews to keep the vessels going somehow by making 
emergency repairs whenever needed. Only conditions as they 
existed before the armistice warranted such abuse. The armi- 
stice occurred opportunely for most of these vessels, and par- 
ticularly for the ex-German liners. War or no war, they had 
about reached the point where they had to be drydocked, re- 
gardless of the effect upon the overseas movement. After the 
armistice it would have been folly to set this tonnage at 
another great task without first putting it in good condition. 
To do the work the Transportation Service had at its disposal 
only its own repair yards at New York and the drydock and 
ship repair yard of the Newport News Shipbuilding Company. 
Because of this limitation the shipping was tied up longer than 
would normally have been necessary. 

The survey conducted by the Transportation Service imme- 
diately after the armistice designated fifty-eight cargo trans- 
ports for conversion. They were the largest vessels of the 
cargo fleet, and conversion equipped them to carry, on the 
average, 2,500 troops on each. Thus the project added 125,000 
accommodations to the trip capacity of the troop-carrying fleet 



THE TRANSATLANTIC FERRY 35 

as it existed on the day of the armistice — more than doubling 
it in size. By December 13 the survey was complete and the 
marine architects were drawing the conversion specifications 
for the individual vessels ; and on that day the Service awarded 
the first of the contracts, that for converting the Buford (which 
later carried the exported radicals to Russia and gained fame 
as the "Soviet Ark"). The cost of remodeling the Buford was 
$70,000, and the contractor completed the work in twenty- 
eight days. By the end of the year twenty conversion contracts 
had been placed. Others followed at intervals until April 29, 
1919, when the last of them was signed. Before June 1 all 
fifty-eight ships were in service as troopships. 

In spite of adverse conditions in industry the ship con- 
tractors made extraordinarily good time in remodeling these 
vessels. Such conversion was practically a rebuilding job. It 
meant tearing out practically the entire interiors of the hulls 
and rebuilding to provide troop quarters, galleys, mess rooms, 
and sanitary facilities. The average time for completing this 
work was forty-one days and the average cost was more than 
$161,000. The total cost was about $9,000,000. 

It will be seen that the project, because of its expense if on 
no other account, was a bold step for the Transportation Serv- 
ice to take. The cost of conversion per passenger accommo- 
dated was about $72 — more than the cost of a single steerage 
passage across the Atlantic on a commercial liner. Looked at 
in a broader way, however, the expenditure of the $9,000,000 
was really an economy, for it enabled the Government to bring 
home and discharge several hundred thousand soldiers weeks 
and even months sooner than would otherwise have been 
possible. 

This single act of converting the cargo transports into troop 
carriers did more than any other one thing to expedite the 
return of the A. E. F. ; yet the aggressiveness of the Trans- 
portation Service did not end there. Under the terms of the 
peace treaty Germany agreed to turn over to the Allies under 
charter most of the remnant of her formerly great passenger- 
carrying merchant fleet. For nearly five years these vessels 



36 DEMOBILIZATION 

had swung at their moorings in German harbors and rivers. 
At her pier in the river Elbe was the Imperator^ the largest 
ship in the world, exceeding in size her sister ship Vaterland^ 
which had become the U. S. Transport Leviathan. The Allied 
Maritime Transport Council, which had allocated world ton- 
nage in the struggle against the submarine, decided to divide 
this fresh German tonnage equally between Great Britain and 
the United States, giving us all the larger vessels because we 
possessed harbors that could accommodate them. The smaller 
ships England was to use in repatriating her Australian troops. 

General Hines, the chief of our Transportation Service, 
took part in the proceedings in London, securing from the 
Council ten large German vessels. At once a U. S. navy board, 
headed by Admiral Benson, chief of the Bureau of Operations 
during the great struggle, went to Germany to put the 
allotted ships in condition for service. Repairs were quickly 
made, and presently all ten ships, propelled by machinery 
unfamiliar to American sailors, sailed out of the German har- 
bors and into the harbor at Brest, manned from bridges to 
firing rooms by Yankee bluejackets and their officers. 

From the London conference General Hines went to see 
various shipping concerns in European Allied and neutral 
countries and secured by charter thirty-three passenger ships 
in all — thirteen from Italian owners, twelve from Spanish 
and Dutch ownership, and eight from French interests. 

Long before this event the Navy had taken fourteen of its 
battleships and ten armored cruisers and by the installation 
of berths and other accommodations had turned them into 
passenger boats capable of carrying 28,600 troops at once. 
These vessels added to the homeward movement more than a 
division of troops a month. 

Thus was the Atlantic rebridged after the armistice and 
with a structure even broader and more capacious than the one 
on which the expedition had crossed to France. On June 23, 
1919, the troopship fleet reached its greatest expansion. On 
that day it consisted of 174 vessels with trip accommodations 
for 419,000 troops. It could have transported the entire 




Photo by Signal Corps 

TROOPS ON BATTLESHIP READY FOR MESS 




Photo by Signal Corps 

WARSHIPS WITH TROOPS DOCKING AT HOBOKEN 




Photo by Signal Corps 

EMBARKING FOR UNITED STATES 




Photo by Signal Corps 

MESS ROOM ON CONVERTED CARGO TRANSPORT OHIOAN 



THE TRANSATLANTIC FERRY 37 

A. E. F. in five trips, with room to spare. It was greater in 
capacity than the combined facilities at our disposal before the 
armistice, yet practically all of it sailed under the Stars and 
Stripes. In number of ships it was four times as large as the 
troop fleet which the Army held in charter and ownership on 
November 1 1 . It outnumbered by forty vessels the combined 
fleet both of American and of Allied troopships at our disposal 
before the armistice. Yet on the day of the armistice we seemed 
to have exhausted the possibilities of ocean shipping! 

Always courageous and swift in action, the Transportation 
Service was one of the first of the war department bureaus to 
anticipate the armistice and the consequent demobilization. On 
November 1, ten days ahead of the armistice, upon the con- 
fidential intelligence that the German Government had ordered 
its fleet out to give battle to the Grand Fleet of the Allies, and 
further assured that the defeat of Germany on land was in 
sight, the Transportation Service stopped the overseas move- 
ment of all combat troops. Primarily this action was taken to 
avoid a disaster to our troop transports, a disaster almost 
bound to occur if in the expected forthcoming naval engage- 
ment any of the German warships were by chance able to slip 
through the Allied cordon and reach the Atlantic. After the 
armistice the anticipatory act of the Transportation Service 
proved to be of material benefit in demobilization, for it had 
kept away from France at least four divisions of troops, 
diminishing by so much the work of bringing back the expedi- 
tion. 

On the fifth day of the armistice General Pershing named 
thirty divisions that were to conduct the advance of the Army 
of Occupation to the Rhine and hold open the communica- 
tions, designated the supply troops to support the divisions, 
and released the rest of the Expeditionary Forces for return 
to the United States as soon as transportation facilities could 
be provided. This order freed nearly half the expedition for 
demobilization. A million men were thus ready to return home 
at once. 

While the authorities in France were preparing for the em- 



38 DEMOBILIZATION 

barkation to come, there was at hand a job in overseas trans- 
portation to which the Transportation Service could turn with 
such troopships as were available for immediate use. In Eng- 
land on the day of the armistice there were stationed more than 
70,000 American soldiers, most of them members of the air 
service squadrons undergoing training in the British aviation 
camps. Their embarkation through the large British seaports 
offered no particular difficulty. On our own regular transports 
and in such space as the Army could secure on British commer- 
cial liners, this whole force was set down in the United States 
within six weeks after the armistice began. 

The embarkation of the A. E. F. in France may be said to 
have started about the middle of December, simultaneously 
with the appearance of the order establishing the three em- 
barkation ports and the embarkation area at Le Mans. From 
then on week by week the embarkations of home-coming troops 
steadily increased in number. In January the first of the con- 
verted cargo transports joined the troopship fleet. A little later 
some of the chartered foreign tonnage appeared in the service. 
About that time, too, the Navy began adding its increment of 
war vessels fitted out as troop carriers. In the late spring we 
secured the German tonnage. In June, 1919, the American 
troop sailings reached a maximum never before attained in 
any military or civilian movement. In that month 368,300 
American soldiers embarked on transports in France, and 
343,600 landed on American soil. The movement exceeded by 
60,000 men that of the greatest month in the transport of the 
A. E. F. to France. In taking the forces to France we had been 
assisted by the merchant marines of the principal Allies to the 
limit of their combined capacities, but we brought back the 
expedition single-handed. 

This great record was made possible not only by the utiliza- 
tion of all tonnage that could be adapted to such service, but 
also by the operation of the shipping at its highest efficiency. 
The drop in morale among the personnel of the Transporta- 
tion Service in the first disheartening weeks of the armistice 
was soon offset by the spirit of the transportation men in early 



THE TRANSATLANTIC FERRY 39 

1919 when they realized the great value of the service they 
were rendering to their comrades of the expedition and to the 
country at large. When it bore into their consciousness that 
they were exceeding all expectations in delivering troops from 
France to the United States, they fell to with a spirit unex- 
celled even in the days when every soldier set down in France 
was so much added insurance of a speedy end to the war. Ship 
vied with ship to cut down steaming time, and the ports com- 
peted with each other in dispatching vessels to sea. 

Under such circumstances all records for shipping efficiency 
fell. In 1918, with every energy bent upon the attainment of 
maximum efficiency, the average turn-around, or round voyage 
across the ocean and back, of the American troop transports 
was something over 36 days. In 1919 during the return move- 
ment it dropped to 32.6 days. 

The oil-burning transport Great Northern^ which was 
bought outright by the War Department in the spring of 1918, 
proved to be the fleetest thing that ever plied the Atlantic. 
Leaving Hoboken on June 24, 1919, with a few passengers, a 
fews days later she landed them at Brest, took on 2,999 troops 
by moonlight, and recrossed to Hoboken — all within twelve 
days, five hours, and thirty minutes. No other vessel, military 
or commercial, ever equaled this speed. The Great Northern 
also established the record of eighteen transatlantic cycles at 
the average rate of twenty-three days for each; and in the 
whole war enterprise she transported more troops per ton of 
capacity than did any other troopship. She was closely crowded 
for honors, however, by her sister ship Northern Pacific. 

The vessels alone could not write such records except 
through the cooperation of the port organizations on both 
sides of the Atlantic. Before the armistice the capacities of the 
ports, especially of those in France, were a sharper limitation 
upon the expansion of American power at the front than was 
the shortage in ocean shipping. After the armistice the im- 
provement in shipping efficiency was attained largely by speed- 
ing up the loading and unloading of transports in port. On 
May 17 the transport Maui at Brest took aboard 3,612 troops 



40 DEMOBILIZATION 

and sailed for America in three hours and thirty-five minutes 
after arriving. These soldiers had to be carried out to her in 
lighters, and they boarded her at the rate of sixty-five a min- 
ute. On the same day the transport Cape May, one of the con- 
verted cargo vessels, arrived at Bordeaux and sailed on the 
same tide with a load of i ,928 troops, having been dispatched 
in one hour and nineteen minutes. These were extreme in- 
stances, but they were indicative of the efficiency of the port 
machinery. 

At first the Transportation Service would fix no schedule 
for the return of the expedition, except the general one that it 
hoped to bring back the last man before January 1, 1920. By 
the beginning of spring, 1919, the situation looked so much 
better that the Service brought out a schedule showing the 
probable troop-carrying capacity available in the French ports 
by months, and estimating this capacity for several months 
ahead. The schedule promised a gradual increase until the 
shipping reached a goal of 250,000 embarkations a month. On 
the basis of this schedule the command of the A. E. F. fixed 
priorities for embarkation and published both the schedule and 
priority dates, to the excitement of the men of the expedition, 
most of whom were then still in France. To be sure, the authori- 
ties promised nothing definitely and informed the soldiers that 
the schedule would be met "if practicable" ; yet the men of the 
A. E. F. banked on the Transportation Service to fulfill its 
predictions. 

The goal of 250,000 embarkations a month was the extreme 
maximum which the Service thought it might attain if every- 
thing went right. Yet three months later, when embarkations 
approached 400,000, the goal had been passed by 50 per cent. 
The actual performance brought 300,000 overseas soldiers 
home two months ahead of schedule, and 300,000 others beat 
the schedule by one month. Here was the equivalent of 
900,000 men returned and discharged from service one month 
earlier than the nation had any reason to expect. The cost of 
maintaining such a force in arms for one month is approxi- 



THE TRANSATLANTIC FERRY 41 

mately $66,000,000, a saving which must be set down to the 
credit of the administration that made it possible. 

The days spent at sea by the returning troops were not time 
wasted. Although the embarkation officers in France did their 
best to send out with each soldier a complete record of his 
service, in the press of the work it was not always possible to 
attain this ideal. It was unjust to hold back a soldier from em- 
barkation because his records were incomplete; yet before he 
could secure his discharge his papers had to be in perfect shape. 
The Transportation Service, through its debarkation camps in 
the United States, took it upon itself to perfect the individual 
records of the soldiers, and it did most of this work on the 
ships at sea. In special schools at Hoboken and Newport News 
the Service trained a force of traveling personnel adjutants for 
assignment to the transports. As soon as a troopship started 
out from France the personnel adjutant aboard opened an 
office, and from that moment until the ship docked he was busy 
from morning to night smoothing up the service records. He 
also compiled the papers which the debarkation camps would 
need and instructed the troops in the procedure to be followed 
after landing. 

Unexpectedly, the Transportation Service found itself 
obliged to bring home in first-class accommodations many more 
persons than it had carried to Europe in that style. Thousands 
of officers had crossed before the armistice in commercial liners, 
and so had crowds of red cross and other welfare workers. 
Numerous soldiers had acquired wives in Europe. Military 
regulation gave these women and their husbands accompany- 
ing them the right to occupy first-class quarters on trans- 
ports. After the armistice several congressional committees and 
hundreds of experts employed by the Government in the peace 
negotiations traveled first-class on the transports in both direc- 
tions. The result was that on July 1, 1919, at the ports in 
France awaiting first-class transportation to America there 
were 32,000 persons over and above the capacity of such 
accommodations in sight for several months to come. To have 
brought them all back in the state to which they were entitled 



42 DEMOBILIZATION 

would have made necessary the full operation of the entire 
transport fleet for three months beyond the time when the 
return movement actually ceased. To settle the matter the 
Service adopted the expedient of bringing home several thou- 
sand junior officers quartered in the troop spaces of certain of 
the larger and faster vessels. Although some outcry arose over 
this treatment, the majority of the officers were too glad to get 
home at all to be critical of the mode of their transportation. 

Not a man of the 2,000,000 passengers lost his life as the 
result of marine disaster after the armistice. The worst acci- 
dent occurred shortly after midnight on January 1, 1919, 
when, during a blinding rainstorm, the great transport North- 
ern Pacific, with a load of 2,500 troops, two-thirds of whom 
were sick and wounded men, went aground on the Long Island 
shore near the entrance to New York harbor. The sea was 
rough, the wind making, and as the ship turned port side to the 
beach and worked up on the sand, pounding heavily, rescue 
for the time was impossible. The weather was cold, the ship's 
machinery was out of commission, and she was lightless and 
unheated. It took three days to rescue the passengers ; yet, de- 
spite the severity of the experience, no person on board suf- 
fered seriously from it. The pounding had so damaged the 
ship's hull that many of the plates had to be renewed. A more 
serious injury was a broken stern-post. In former marine prac- 
tice such an injury meant the casting of a new post in steel. 
The Navy, as in the instance of the broken machinery in the 
interned German ships, resorted to the electric welding torch 
for repairing the broken stern-post, saving several months in 
time and perhaps $50,000 in money. 

The A. E. F. sold most of its property in Europe. The cargo 
transports brought home about 850,000 tons of military 
freight — a small fraction of the property held by the expedi- 
tion at the time of the armistice. The goods were sold abroad at 
a loss, the average recovery being considerably under that re- 
ceived from the sale of similar goods in the United States. Yet 
it was good policy to do what was done. Europe needed the 
supplies and we needed the ship-space for other purposes. If 




Photo by Signal Corps 



SAILING DAY AT ST. NAZAIRE 




Photo by Signal Corps 

TRANSPORT MAUI LOADING AT ST. NAZAIRE 




Photo by Signal Corps 



SOUVENIRS OF HIS SERVICE 




Photo by Signal Corps 



EMBARKING AT ST. NAZAIRE 



THE TRANSATLANTIC FERRY 43 

the materials had been returned to the United States for sale, 
out of the proceeds would have had to be deducted the trans- 
portation cost; and the Government was little, if anything, 
out of pocket by the transaction. 

Among the materials freighted home were 100,000 tons of 
road-making machinery. This the War Department turned 
over to the Department of Agriculture to be used in the con- 
struction of highways in the United States. The cargo trans- 
ports also brought back large ordnance stores, principally 
artillery, much of it of British and French manufacture. The 
shipments included a large number of captured German 
cannon, brought back for distribution among American com- 
munities as war trophies. 

While the returning troop movement was at its height the 
Transportation Service was winding up its war business and 
returning to a permanent peace footing. This program con- 
sisted principally of disposing of its vessels and its shore 
establishments. On November 11, 1918, the Service was oper- 
ating 580 vessels with a total deadweight of nearly 4,000,000 
tons. At the end of 1919 the army fleet consisted of only the 
few transports actually owned by the Government through 
purchase, construction, or seizure from Germany or Austria. 

Most of its vessels the Army held under charter from pri- 
vate owners. The best interests of the United States required 
the return of these ships to their ownership just as soon as the 
Army could do without them. The cargo boats were first to go. 
In February, 1919, the Transportation Service began turn- 
ing them back — redelivering them, it was called — at the rate 
of three ships a day. In July, when the peak of the overseas 
troop movement had passed, the Service began disposing of its 
chartered troopships (including the converted cargo trans- 
ports), redelivering the last of them in December. 

The Government faced tremendous costs in these trans- 
actions. The charters provided that the Army must restore the 
shipping to its owners in its original condition, ordinary wear 
and tear excepted. Nearly every ship had been remodeled to a 
greater or less extent to make it more serviceable to the Army. 



44 DEMOBILIZATION 

All the domestic shipyards and repair yards were glutted with 
work, and it was evident that it would be a long time be- 
fore the Transportation Service could recondition the vessels. 
Meanwhile the Service would have to maintain all of this idle 
shipping at a heavy continuing expense. 

Instead of reconditioning the ships, therefore, the Trans- 
portation Service adopted the policy of returning vessels as 
they were, at the same time compensating the owners with 
lump-sum settlements for damage done by war service. In 
most instances the owners were glad enough to accept such an 
arrangement. To protect the Government in the settlements, 
joint boards of vessel survey, each consisting of an army, a 
navy, and a United States shipping board official, were set 
up at all the ports where ships were to be redelivered. Expert 
marine surveyors under their direction made detailed exami- 
nations of all the ships. With these surveys in hand, and with 
the complete history of each ship and of the service it had 
undergone while in the War Department's possession, the sur- 
vey boards were able to arrive at a close estimate of the 
amount of the Government's financial liability in each case. 
The owners also employed their expert surveyors, and out of 
the two examinations grew negotiations which arrived at 
compromise settlements. 

In December, 1918, the Service redelivered ships of ap- 
proximately 189,000 deadweight tons. In January the rede- 
livered ships aggregated 461,000 deadweight tons; in Febru- 
ary, 470,000; and in March occurred the heaviest redelivery, 
amounting to approximately 532,000 deadweight tons. Rede- 
liveries crossed the two-million-deadweight-ton mark shortly 
after the middle of April. By June most of the cargo transports 
had been restored to their owners, except those which had been 
converted into troop carriers. On June 15 the Army began dis- 
pensing with the use of battleships and cruisers, the last of 
the twenty- four being withdrawn on August l. The break-up 
of the troop fleet began in earnest on August 1, and by the 
first anniversary of the armistice most of the chartered troop- 
ships had gone back to commercial work. 



THE TRANSATLANTIC FERRY 45 

Many questions of admiralty law arose in connection with 
the restoration of the transports to the merchant marine. The 
legal branch of the Transportation Service on the day of the 
armistice consisted of but two lawyers. By that time a large 
number of maritime claims awaiting adjudication had accumu- 
lated, and it was recognized that such claims would multiply 
during the progress of negotiations leading to the redelivery of 
the vessels. With much difficulty the Service built up a force 
of twenty admiralty lawyers. In fact, the War Department, 
after the armistice, was so badly in need of lawyers for use in 
the liquidation of war business, that for several months it was 
forced to maintain the rule that no man of legal training 
should be discharged from the military service. 

In breaking up the fleet of troop transports the Transporta- 
tion Service found opportunity to create for the War Depart- 
ment a large permanent reserve of troopships without expense 
to the Government for their maintenance. The German and 
Austrian ships seized by the Government at the outset of the 
war became in large part the property of the Army. Most of 
these vessels were admirably adapted to war service, but they 
were too large and too costly in operation to justify their 
continuance in the transport service of the peace-time estab- 
lishment. Consequently the Transportation Service turned 
thirteen of them over to the Shipping Board under an agree- 
ment providing for their charter to private operators, subject 
to their recall by the Army in the event of another war. These 
ships can accommodate approximately 50,000 troops at once. 
All of the special military fittings have been classified and 
stored away ready for use again, if it ever becomes necessary. 

When the war traffic ended, the Transportation Service 
found itself in possession of enormous port facilities. Prior to 
the armistice the Government had seized or leased over seventy 
steamship piers at various Atlantic and Gulf ports; but even 
such facilities being entirely inadequate to the vast amount of 
shipping contemplated, the Government began the construc- 
tion of seven great port bases located at Boston, Brooklyn, 
Port Newark, Philadelphia, Norfolk, Charleston, and New 



46 DEMOBILIZATION 

Orleans. Not one of these projects was complete on November 
11. One of the early demobilization questions to be settled was 
what to do with these installations. Should the Government 
abandon them and set down as loss the millions spent, or go 
ahead with their erection and perhaps make the whole enter- 
prise profitable by leasing the facilities to American com- 
merce"? The latter course was chosen. The contractors com- 
pleted the construction at a total cost of $143,000,000. As the 
new piers became ready for use the Transportation Service 
turned back its leased piers to their owners. Then, as the mili- 
tary traffic dwindled, the space in the base terminals was 
leased to private ship operators. These terminals, among the 
largest and finest in the United States, are now rendering an 
important service to our foreign trade, but on terms ensuring 
their instant availability to the Government in the event of a 
future emergency.* 

* In the spring of 1919 the Transportation Service brought back to America 
from Archangel the American troops, about 4,500 in number, sent to northern 
Russia in September, 1918, to combat the Bolsheviki. It also, in late 1919 and 
early 1920, transported from Vladivostok to American Pacific ports about 
10,000 American troops who had been sent to Siberia at different times to aid 
Czecho-Slovak, Japanese, and other Allied forces in operations against Ger- 
man and Austrian troops aiding the hostile native Russians in Siberia. In 1920 
the Transportation Service, acting as an independent contractor, undertook to 
repatriate 30,000 of the Czecho-Slovak Siberian troops cut off from escape to 
the Balkans by the successes of the Bolsheviki in southern Russia. To the 
government of Czecho-Slovakia the Service named the price of $12,000,000 for 
this work, a price criticized in this country as too low. The last of the 30,000 
Czecho-Slovaks were landed at Trieste about January 1, 1921, and the whole 
job had been carried through at a cost of approximately $8,000,000. The Service 
employed twelve U. S. transports for one or more trips in the movement of 
the Czech expedition, and two of them — the America and the President Grant, 
both ex-German liners — circumnavigated the globe in the process of the work, 
proceeding from New York to Vladivostok via Panama and thence to Trieste 
via the Indian Ocean and the Suez Canal, and from Trieste to New York via 
Gibraltar. The Czechs traveled under American military discipline with what 
that implies in cleanliness and sanitation, and therefore moved without the 
epidemics of disease that have usually accompanied the progress of Balkan 
forces. 



CHAPTER IV 
EBB TIDE 

BEFORE the American Expeditionary Forces could be 
disbanded in this country it was necessary for the 
training camps, most of which were to become demobi- 
lization centers after the armistice, to be evacuated by the 
home forces occupying them. The fluvial system leading into 
that sea of humanity which we knew as the A. E. F. — main 
river crossing the ocean, chief tributaries leading up to the 
ports in this country, beyond them their branch creeks and 
brooks, and the rills at the sources — was running bank-full on 
the day of the armistice. Demobilization, which inverted many 
of the processes of war and changed familiar names into their 
antonyms, abruptly reversed the direction of troop-flow, as if 
some tremendous power had uplifted the reservoir and the 
mouth of the main stream in France above the ultimate sources 
in this country. Before the expeditionary sea could drain out, 
the home channels of troop supply had to discharge their 
contents into the nimbus of civilian life. 

The process of dissolution began within the hour in which 
the news of peace came to Washington. It happened that 
November 1 1 was the first of five days during which the Army 
planned to absorb 250,000 soldiers inducted into service under 
the terms of the Selective Service Act. Although it was evident 
that an armistice was at hand, the Railroad Administration 
went ahead with preparations for the transportation of these 
men to the training camps, and even dispatched the draft 
trains on the morning of November 1 1 to pick up the selec- 
tives, although the morning newspapers had announced that 
the armistice was indisputably to begin at eleven o'clock in 



48 DEMOBILIZATION 

France. The only preparation looking toward demobilization 
had been to set up telephone and telegraph circuits over which 
the officials in Washington could stop and turn back the troop 
trains in a minimum of time. Immediately after receiving Gen- 
eral Pershing's message announcing the start of the armistice, 
the Secretary of War notified the Troop-Movement Section 
of the Railroad Administration to stop the draft trains. This 
was done within an hour, although the trains were then in 
operation in every section of the United States. Some thou- 
sands of young men who had taken the oath of allegiance that 
morning, and who at the approach of noon were on troop 
trains proceeding to military camps, found themselves back at 
home, civilians once more, before the embers of the celebrating 
bonfires had died out that night. 

Hard on their heels came the hundreds of thousands of sol- 
diers who made up the combat divisions in training in the 
United States. These were the men last to don the uniform — 
men who were only partially trained, and who could be of no 
service to the W^ar Department in the activities of demobiliza- 
tion. Their disbandment was not a difficult undertaking. They 
had been in the service so short a time that there were no com- 
plications of back pay and incomplete records to hinder their 
discharge. Moreover, they were geographically homogeneous — 
i.e., their homes were generally in the regions surrounding the 
training camps — and therefore their demobilization brought 
about no problem in transportation. As a rule they were paid 
off and discharged at their training camps and allowed to make 
their way to their homes. 

Quite apart from the divisional troops, there was another 
great body of soldiers in the United States on the day of the 
armistice. These were men undergoing training in special 
camps, such as those of the Air Service and the Quartermaster 
Corps, and also the troops engaged in maintaining the great 
war establishment in the United States. The demobilization 
of these men was more difficult. It was for them in the first 
place that the War Department set up the demobilization 
system which was to be seen in the perfection of operation 



EBB TIDE 49 

later on when the A. E. F. began reaching the United States 
en masse. 

Soon after the armistice the War Department established 
by order a system of thirty-three demobilization camps, or 
centers, as they were called. In large part these centers were 
former training camps. Practically all the National Army 
cantonments and some of the National Guard camps were so 
used. Other military posts and stations were added so as to 
distribute the demobilization centers evenly throughout the 
country according to the distribution of population. The War 
Department's policy was to discharge soldiers in as close 
proximity as possible to their former places of residence. 

The special troops on duty in this country lacked homo- 
geneity in the regional origin of the members of the various 
units. Many of the organizations were composed entirely of 
men chosen because of special aptitude for special service. 
Single units were therefore made up of men from widely 
separated parts of the United States. When the time came to 
disperse these troops it was found impossible to send the units 
intact to demobilization centers and there to disband them, 
except at a great waste of transportation. Throughout the 
whole activity the War Department husbanded transporta- 
tion. Before the armistice it had been the general policy to 
move men always to the eastward, since east was forward. 
The armistice inverted the policy; and in order to avoid ex- 
pensive duplication of travel, the Army in assembling its de- 
mobilization units moved its men always essentially westward 
until at length they reached the camps where they were to be 
discharged. 

Throughout the winter of 1918-1919 the disintegration of 
the home forces proceeded rapidly, as the great subordinate 
services of the Army tapered off their war activities and re- 
leased their men. One or two of the services, such as the Medi- 
cal Department and the Motor Transport Corps, held on to 
their troops for a few months in order to carry out necessary 
duties connected with the disbanding of the Army and the 
restoration of the military establishment to a peace footing; 



50 DEMOBILIZATION 

but the others, such as the Air Service, the Signal Corps, the 
Corps of Engineers, and the Quartermaster Corps, reduced 
strength as rapidly as the country could absorb the men. These 
men lost their unit identity as they proceeded toward the de- 
mobilization centers and finally found themselves once more 
grouped with their neighbors, regardless of what service any 
of them had performed. 

By the end of February, 1919, more than 1,600,000 officers 
and enlisted men had been discharged from the Army. At that 
time only about 300,000 of the expeditionary troops had 
reached the United States. The great body of the A. E. F. was 
still to come, but the demobilization centers in the United 
States were empty and ready for it. 

The policy of discharging troops at centers adjacent to their 
homes rested upon a sound foundation. As the country faced 
the demobilization of 4,000,000 troops, young men most of 
whom had been held for many months under the rigid re- 
straints of army discipline, there was a widespread apprehen- 
sion that the discharged soldiers might congregate in the larger 
cities and create profound economic disturbances. Upon the 
War Department there was no compulsion of law to transport 
the troops to their own neighborhoods before discharging them. 
Obviously the easy and convenient thing was to discharge 
them wherever they happened to be — at the thousand and one 
camps in the United States, or at the Atlantic ports upon their 
arrival from France — discharge them there, pay them off, and 
so farewell to them. Such, in fact, had been army procedure be- 
fore the World War. The Army discharged its men at the posts 
where they were serving and paid to them the travel allow- 
ances granted by law. Whether they used their money to pay 
for actual transportation home was no concern of the Army's. 
They were all free, and most of them white and twenty-one. 
As long as discharges were relatively few this procedure had 
no effect upon the economic life of the nation. But what 
would have been the result if the War Department had con- 
tinued this practice when disbanding the 4,000,000 troops in 
uniform on the day of the armistice? Most of them would 



EBB TIDE 51 

have been turned loose in the vicinity of the large cities of the 
United States — more than 1,000,000 of them at New York 
.ai.one. Their pockets would have been crammed with money. 
Congress by special enactment raised the travel allowance for 
discharged soldiers to five cents a mile, payable for the dis- 
tance between the place of discharge and the soldier's home, 
whether the entire journey could be accomplished by railroad 
or not. Congress also granted a bonus of $60 to every soldier — 
payable also at discharge. Thousands of soldiers, when they 
came up for discharge, were entitled to back pay. Thus every 
man received a considerable sum of money with his discharge 
certificate, and for the overseas soldier this sum probably 
averaged more than $100. The streets of our cities would have 
been thronged with such men during the first six months of 
1919. After their hardships the temptation to have a fling at 
metropolitan entertainments would have been well-nigh irre- 
sistible. They would have been fair game for gamblers and 
sharp practitioners. The rare individual might have bought 
his ticket and gone soberly home, but the majority could 
scarcely have been expected to show such restraint. In a little 
while, pockets that had jingled with money would have been 
empty, the streets would have been crowded with stranded 
soldiers, and the burdened municipalities would have had to 
face a severe civic problem. 

This was what the War Department sought to avoid, and 
what it did avoid, by its demobilization policy. There was 
also another consideration — that of financial economy. The 
War Department could carry troops at a cost of much less 
than five cents a mile per capita. Therefore, by distributing 
the Army about the country and discharging every man within 
his own native section the War Department was able to save 
millions of dollars which otherwise would have been paid out 
in mileage allowances. 

The good offices of the Government to the demobilized sol- 
dier did not end when the War Department had paid him his 
money and discharged him. As a special inducement to de- 
mobilized soldiers not to linger in the communities near the 



52 DEMOBILIZATION 

demobilization centers, the United States Railroad Adminis- 
tration made a special travel rate to them of two cents a mile. 
In order to secure the cut rate, however, the soldier had to buy 
his ticket within twenty-four hours after receiving his dis- 
charge. Thus it was to his direct financial advantage to go 
home at once. Nor did the Railroad Administration permit 
him to overlook the opportunity. All the principal demobiliza- 
tion centers had their own railway terminals, from which spe- 
cial trains for discharged soldiers departed at intervals. The 
Railroad Administration set up railway ticket booths in the 
offices of the camp finance officers, so that each newly dis- 
charged man, as he turned away from the disbursing window 
with his money in his hand, faced the railway ticket booth. 
At his elbow were Red Cross, Y. M. C. A., and other camp 
welfare workers to urge him to buy his railway ticket at once 
and leave on the first train. The path of least resistance led 
straight home, and he was indeed a headstrong individual who 
did not follow it. As a result of the whole system the demobi- 
lization of the Army went through without any trouble at all. 
The policy had an effect upon the mode of troop travel that 
was to be observed even beyond the ports of embarkation in 
France. The original plan had been to bring all the expedi- 
tionary divisions back to the camps in which they had been 
organized and trained, and there to disband them. There 
seemed to be nothing in the way of so simple a solution of the 
problem. In organizing the divisions in the first place, it had 
been the policy, to which there were but few exceptions, to 
create divisions of men originating in the territory contiguous 
to each training camp. As the divisions started for France they 
possessed definite territorial identity ; and the divisional names 
which they commonly adopted for themselves — the New Eng- 
land Division, the Sunset Division, the Buckeye Division, the 
Keystone Division, and so on — usually indicated the geographi- 
cal origin of the men of the organizations. It was thought that, 
by transporting the overseas divisions back to their original 
training camps in this country, each would be placed in the 



EBB TIDE 53 

demobilization center most convenient to the respective homes 
of its soldiers. 

The attempt to put this policy into practice quickly showed 
the fallacy of it. Immediately it was discovered that the com- 
position of the divisions had radically changed during the serv- 
ice in France. Men had died in battle, fallen sick, been trans- 
ferred to other organizations, and their places had been taken 
by replacement troops shipped from the United States. Whole 
divisions had been rearranged. In the autumn of 1918 the 
expeditionary divisions were no longer representative of sepa- 
rate districts of the United States; each was in effect a cross 
section of the whole of America. 

One of the first organizations to come back from France was 
a minor unit, a company, which had received its training at 
Camp Cody, Texas. The unit was sent to Camp Cody for 
demobilization and discharge. There it was discovered that, 
of every ten men who had joined the unit when it was in train- 
ing, only four remained. The other six were newcomers, and 
to reach their homes they had to travel to points scattered 
from Oregon to the Atlantic coast. 

Had this system been followed throughout the disbanding 
of the expeditionary units, it is evident that it would have 
cost the Government heavily in travel allowances paid to dis- 
charged soldiers, without saying anything about the tremen- 
dous traffic burden upon the railroads of the country. There 
was nothing to do but to break up the whole organization of 
the A. E. F. before sending it to the demobilization centers, 
and to assemble the men once more in units that possessed 
geographical identity. 

The A. E. F. received instructions to attempt this break-up 
in France — at least to begin it there. It was found impossible 
to regroup the services of supply troops to any extent, because 
the embarkation ports in France, at which the supply troops 
were prepared for embarkation, were neither organized nor 
equipped to handle such a difficult work. More could be done 
with the divisional troops at Le Mans. Thereafter, whenever 
a division came into the area of Le Mans those soldiers who 



54 DEMOBILIZATION 

had joined the division after its training had been complete, 
and who did not live in the district centering in the original 
training camp in America, were detached and assembled with 
neighbors of theirs into territorial demobilization units, which 
became known as overseas casual companies. When the divi- 
sion itself went on from Le Mans to the ports it consisted only 
of the remnant of charter members who had been with it from 
the outset. 

The prescribed size of an overseas casual company was two 
officers and 150 men, but it was seldom convenient to send 
forth companies uniformly organized. Men were not held 
waiting in France until casual companies could be built up to 
the prescribed size. One company might consist of fifty sol- 
diers and the next 250, according to circumstances in the 
embarkation camp. 

The principal ports of embarkation in the United States 
before the armistice had been New York (Hoboken), Newport 
News, and Boston. To these, in the system for receiving the 
overseas troops, was added Charleston, South Carolina. 
Charleston was opened as a port of debarkation principally 
for soldiers who were proceeding to the southern demobiliza- 
tion centers. The entire fleet of troop transports was divided 
proportionately among these ports, the greatest number oper- 
ating between New York and the ports in France and the next 
greatest between Newport News and France. In the main each 
port kept its own fleet, but sometimes it became necessary to 
divert a vessel at sea from her usual course. 

Only in a general way did the embarkation authorities in 
France pay attention to the destinations of the ships. After 
each loaded transport left a French port the embarkation offi- 
cials there cabled to the Transportation Service in the United 
States a full description of the troops on board. If, for exam- 
ple, a vessel bound for Boston were carrying a preponderant 
number of soldiers from the South, the Transportation Service 
used the wireless to divert the transport to Newport News or 
Charleston. 

The passenger lists cabled to the United States often con- 




Photo by Signal Corps 

CASUALS WAITING TO BOARD SHIP AT ST. NAZAIRE 




Photo by Signal Corps 

BOARDING EDWARD LUCKENBACH, CONVERTED CARGO 
TRANSPORT 




Photo by Signal Corps 



EMBARKATION AT BORDEAUX 




Photo by Signal Corps 



LEFT BEHIND 



EBB TIDE S5 

tained the first information received in this country about the 
departure of units from France, There was no news more 
eagerly awaited by the people. Cities and states had often 
made elaborate preparations for the reception of their overseas 
soldiers. A number of states and cities sent representatives to 
the ports to welcome the troops home at the gates of America. 
The harbor boat of the New York Mayor's Committee of 
Welcome was busy almost every day taking visiting delega- 
tions down the bay to meet the incoming transports. In the 
times when from 150,000 to 200,000 soldiers were on the 
ocean at once in transports bound for the United States, keep- 
ing track of each unit became difficult. The Transportation 
Service set up a news and information bureau through which 
the press and the public kept in touch with the movements of 
organizations crossing from France. 

Upon the debarkation camps at the Atlantic ports fell the 
chief work of splitting up the returning expedition into de- 
mobilization units. There were five major debarkation camps — 
Merritt, Mills, and Upton at New York, and Stuart and Hill 
at Newport News — besides numerous smaller centers at both 
ports. At the height of the return movement these camps were 
insufficient to accommodate the incoming thousands, and the 
Transportation Service used former training camps as debar- 
kation camps, in both the Hoboken and Chesapeake districts. 
As long as Boston and Charleston acted as ports of debarka- 
tion they, too, made use of neighboring training camps. 

Of all of the debarkation camps, Camp Merritt was the 
largest. In it were to be observed some of the most interest- 
ing processes of troop demobilization. It was the principal 
camp both for reception of overseas casual companies and for 
the breaking-up of organized units and the formation of casual 
detachments for distribution among the thirty-three demobi- 
lization centers. 

During demobilization Camp Merritt was like a great termi- 
nal post office. The mail consisted of bulk consignments of sol- 
dier members of the disintegrating American Expeditionary 
Forces. It was the task of the post office to sort the mail for 



56 DEMOBILIZATION 

thirty-three principal destinations. The individual soldiers 
were thrown into receptacles called Hoboken Casual Com- 
panies, each, when filled up, consisting of two officers and 150 
men, and each addressed to one or another of the demobiliza- 
tion centers. Each bore an identifying number, and the num- 
bers ran consecutively, reaching well into four figures before 
the work came to an end. 

Special trains frequently left the two railroad stations which 
served Camp Merritt. Sometimes an entire train would be 
loaded with casual companies bound for the same center. Other 
trains were made up of special cars destined for different 
terminals. In the camp new casual companies in skeletal form 
were constantly being organized. Those scheduled to travel to 
the less populous sections of the country might be several days 
in filling up to standard strength. Others reached full size in 
a few hours. As soon as a casual company was complete, it was 
dispatched immediately to its proper demobilization camp. For 
several months in the spring and summer of 1919 the average 
interval between the time a skeleton company was formed and 
the time it was dispatched from camp was less than twenty- 
four hours. 

Before the armistice, troops which had been inspected, 
equipped for the overseas voyage, and otherwise prepared at 
Camp Merritt, marched east from the camp over three miles 
of macadamized highway and then down the old Cornwallis 
trail descending the Palisades, until they reached the little 
landing on the Hudson River known as Alpine, several miles 
north of the metropolitan limits of New York. There they 
boarded ferry-boats and rode on them directly to the transport 
piers in the North River. After the armistice, soldiers debark- 
ing at the piers boarded ferry-boats at the pier ends, rode up 
the river to Alpine, climbed the Palisades, and marched to 
Camp Merritt. Those bound for Camp Mills or Camp Upton 
took ferry to the Long Island Railroad terminal at Long Island 
City on the East River. Those ticketed for Camp Dix boarded 
trains which had been run into the Hoboken yard on the spur 



EBB TIDE 57 

track constructed there by the Government after it seized the 
pier property from Germany. 

At the debarkation camps the Army applied its final pre- 
cautions against the importation of European diseases and 
insect pests. There was a thorough disinfection of all clothing 
and equipment, and each principal camp maintained a delous- 
ing plant. However clean the soldiers might have been when 
they embarked in France, it was always possible for a few of 
them to become infested on the transports. So far as is known, 
not a cootie got through the barrage of steam, superheated air, 
soap, and hot water laid down by the Army at both ends of 
the transatlantic ferry route. 

Before the return of the A. E. F. was well under way an 
important change took place in the organization of the official 
military travel bureau. Before the armistice, military trans- 
portation had been in the hands of two independent war de- 
partment agencies. The Inland Traffic Service had charge of 
the movements of men and supplies by rail within the United 
States and up to the ports of embarkation. There the Embar- 
kation Service received both, loaded them on the ships, and de- 
livered them to the ports in France. Beyond those points the 
Quartermaster Service of the A. E. F. was in charge of mili- 
tary traffic. Both the Inland Traffic Service and the Embarka- 
tion Service were branches of the General Staif Division of 
Purchase, Storage, and Traffic. 

In December, 1918, the Inland Traffic Service and the Em- 
barkation Service joined to form a new branch called the 
Transportation Service, and for the first time the Army had a 
single organization in charge of all military travel, both freight 
and passenger, on this side of the piers in Europe. General 
Hines of the Embarkation Service became chief of the Trans- 
portation Service. The union brought about a coordination 
which made it possible for a limited equipment of railway 
coaches to carry troops away from the ports of debarkation as 
fast as the ships delivered them there. 

As a rule, the overseas men did not travel so comfortably 
from the ports of debarkation to the demobilization centers as 



58 DEMOBILIZATION 

they had ridden when, months earlier, they had traveled from 
those same centers up to the ports to board the ships for France. 
The conditions of military transportation were different. The 
equipment of railway cars at the Army's disposal was limited. 
It had never consisted of more than 1,500 sleeping cars — tour- 
ist sleepers they were, made by removing the rugs and hang- 
ings from first-class Pullman coaches. These 1,500 cars, in full 
operation, could carry less than 50,000 men at one time. 
Nevertheless, although before the armistice the Army supplied 
railroad transportation to over 8,000,000 men, nearly every- 
one who traveled at night slept in a comfortable berth. Dur- 
ing that period practically all the long-haul travel was between 
the training camps and the ports of embarkation. The forces in 
America proceeded to embarkation by divisions — camp by 
camp. Thus it was possible to arrange the shipping schedules 
to allow for the most convenient operation of the military 
rolling stock. But no such arrangement was possible during 
demobilization. The system of splitting up the overseas units 
at the ports in this country and distributing their men accord- 
ing to residential origin made it necessary to maintain prac- 
tically continuous train service between the various Atlantic 
ports and the thirty-three demobilization centers. The sleeping- 
car equipment was not nearly large enough to serve in such 
an operation, and a great many soldiers rode in day coaches 
halfway across the continent. They did not grumble too much 
at the treatment. It was better than riding in French box cars, 
at any rate, and after all they were getting home. 

One of the finest accomplishments of military transportation 
after the armistice was the distribution of 150,000 sick and 
wounded soldiers of the A. E. F. among the many military 
hospitals of the United States. The Transportation Service 
operated six hospital ships at New York. These vessels took 
the patients from the general debarkation hospital on Ellis 
Island and carried them on their way to various special evacua- 
tion hospitals in the New York metropolitan district. From 
there they were sent to general hospitals throfighout the country. 
The Service kept six hospital trains in continuous operation, as 



EBB TIDE 59 

well as about 250 hospital cars. No such movement of invalids 
was ever before known in the United States. 

The records of the Transportation Service show that in dis- 
banding the Army it carried over 7,000,000 military passengers 
in special cars and trains. The average journey was 500 miles. 
Train accidents cost the lives of only two soldiers and injured 
only seventeen. This high degree of safety was largely due to 
the fact that troop trains were held down to a running schedule 
of twenty miles an hour. 

The whole system of distribution and travel would have 
worked almost automatically except for one thing — the victory 
parades. Whenever it could do so without too great disruption 
of the system, the War Department yielded to the desire of 
communities to celebrate with parades the return of their over- 
seas sons. Nearly 200,000 troops in all marched in more than 
450 parades, which ranged from the brief processions of single 
companies to such great demonstrations as those of the First 
Division in New York and Washington in September, 1919. 

Six parades of returning overseas troops passed under the 
triumphal arch over Fifth Avenue at Madison Square, New 
York. Of these, the parades of the Twenty-seventh and 
Seventy-seventh Divisions, both originally composed almost 
exclusively of New York men, were closest to the metropolitan 
heart. Part of the Twenty-eighth Division paraded in Phila- 
delphia on May 15, 1919. The Thirty-third Division paraded 
in Chicago in three sections in late May and early June. 

These processions were but preliminary to the greatest cele- 
bration of all — the one which occurred when the First Divi- 
sion, first to go to France, last to come back, returned, with 
General John J. Pershing, the Commander-in-Chief of the 
American Expeditionary Forces, at its head. In arranging for 
the parades of the First Division, the War Department deter- 
mined to show the spectators a combat division in full field 
panoply — and that meant equipping it with its transport ani- 
mals. All divisions had left their animals in France, and solely 
for these spectacles the Transportation Service assembled in 
New York before the day of the first parade several thousand 



6o DEMOBILIZATION 

horses and mules secured from army posts as far west as Texas 
and then transported to New York. 

The First Division gathered in the debarkation camps at 
New York. It included as an attached unit the specially trained 
drill regiment of the Third Army Corps. So augmented, it con- 
sisted of nearly 24,000 men and their wheeled equipment of 
artillery, service trains, repair shops, bakeries, kitchens, and 
so on, the motorized equipment alone numbering five hundred 
trucks and sixty motorcycles. The transportation of this great 
unit to Washington afforded a special problem that would 
have been impossible of solution by any organization less ex- 
pert than the one which had administered military travel for 
so many months past. There were no facilities at Washington 
for the accommodation of such a number of troops, and there- 
fore it was necessary to hold them in the New York camps and 
take them to Washington on the eve of the parade itself. After 
the New York appearance of the Division its motor fleet was 
sent over the highways to Washington, the vehicles inciden- 
tally carrying 1,770 men with them. The freighting to Wash- 
ington of the animals and horse-drawn vehicles, including the 
artillery, began immediately after the New York parade dis- 
banded and continued for several days. The twenty-two trains 
carrying the foot soldiers all arrived in Washington during the 
night before the parade, the last ones just in time to allow 
their passengers to find their places in the procession. 

The moving spectacle which followed gave the national 
capital and, through the newspaper accounts, the country, an 
approximation of the Grand Review that occurred in Wash- 
ington at the close of the Civil War. For four hours the Divi- 
sion marched between thronigs such as Washington ordinarily 
knows only when a President is inaugurated, down Pennsyl- 
vania Avenue, past the Treasury and the White House and 
the reviewing stand, in which were some of the chief uniformed 
and civilian dignitaries of the Government, including General 
Pershing. A roaring squadron of airplanes skimmed the tree- 
tops between the capitol and the war department building; 
an observation balloon swayed in air above the White House; 




Photo by Signal Corps 



HOME AGAIN 




Photo by Signal Corps 

WELCOMING RETURNING TROOPS AT HOBOKEN 




Photo by Air Service 

FIRST DIVISION PARADING ON PENNSYLVANIA AVENUE 




Photo by Air Service 

VICTORY ARCH IN W^ASHINGTON 



EBB TIDE 61 

and as the steady procession passed — mile after mile of trig 
ranks, bronzed faces, showy war medals and regimental decora- 
tions, burnished caparisons, regimental bands, field guns, 
limbers and caissons, ammunition trucks, quartermaster supply 
trains, ambulance trains, engineering trains with strange imple- 
ments mounted upon motor trucks, horse-drawn carts for many 
purposes, rolling field kitchens, and finally the jarring tanks, 
their caterpillar treads leaving indelible matrices in the sun- 
warmed asphalt — with emotion the spectator beheld this living 
presentment of the power which America had exerted in the 
great war. 



CHAPTER V 
THE PROCESS OF DISCHARGING SOLDIERS 

FOUR hours after the First Division finished parading in 
Washington, its troops were in Camp Meade, thirty 
miles away, where the "emergency" soldiers in the divi- 
sion's ranks were to be discharged. There, like the millions who 
had preceded them into the demobilization centers, they fell 
into the hands of two expert crews, each competing with the 
other in speeding up the processes of discharge from the Army. 

The two principal operations in the discharge of a soldier 
were (i) examining him physically and (2) computing how 
much the Government owed him and paying over to him the 
amount determined. These two activities were in the hands of 
central organizations functioning at the demobilization cen- 
ters. The preparation of the soldier's certificate of discharge 
and of the papers for his permanent record, to be retained in 
the government files, was in the hands of his company officers. 

For the first time after a great war the American Army 
retained a complete record of the exact physical condition of 
every soldier at the time of his discharge. Had the Army done 
this in the past, doubtless it would have saved the Government 
much trouble and expense arising from fraudulent claims for 
alleged physical disability arising from military service. The 
purpose of the final physical examinations at the camps was 
not only to give the Government this record, but also to dis- 
cover any men who might be suffering from contagious diseases 
or from infirmities susceptible of cure under further treatment 
in the army hospitals. The Army would not let men go until 
the Medical Department had done all it could for them. 

The boards of physicians and surgeons which conducted the 
examinations were made up of specialists in seven branches of 
medicine, including dentistry. As each soldier entered the 



PROCESS OF DISCHARGING SOLDIERS 63 

examination building, he was first taken in hand by officers 
who explained to him what the Government would do in the 
way of compensation for disabilities incurred in the Service 
and who urged him to make claim for any disability from 
which he knew he was suffering. For this purpose he received 
a claim form to fill out. He then passed through the seven 
sections of the examination; and if this scrutiny disclosed no 
disability, and if he had claimed none, he was granted a clean 
bill of health and passed on to the pay officers. 

The degree of disability was expressed in percentage. A 
rated disability of 50 per cent meant that in the opinion of the 
examiners the soldier's earning power in his former occupation 
had been decreased by half by reason of injury^ or infirmity 
incurred in the military service. Under the law the Bureau of 
War Risk Insurance automatically granted compensation to 
disabled veterans of the war up to eighty dollars a month (for 
total disability), requiring only that the disabled soldier pre- 
pare his claim on a form sent to him by the Bureau upon its 
receipt of the report of the examining board at the demobiliza- 
tion center. Disability of less than 10 per cent was not com- 
pensatable under the law, and so the examining boards certi- 
fied to the Bureau of War Risk Insurance only the records of 
disability amounting to 10 per cent or more.* 

At first it took the medical boards a considerable time to 
give examinations to large units of troops awaiting discharge; 
but Washington kept putting more and more pressure upon 
the demobilization centers to speed up, until finally the flat 
order went forth that all troops arriving at a camp must be 

* The disability discovered in these examinations was surprisingly small, 
affecting a little more than 5 per cent of the soldiers examined. Since the 
so-called limited-service men — soldiers suffering from physical disability at 
the time of their induction and accepted for military duties with the proviso 
that they should serve in capacities where their physical shortcomings would 
not impair their value to the Government — since these men also went to the 
demobilization centers for discharge, it is evident that, to show a true picture 
of the physical condition of the Army at demobilization, the limited-service 
troops must be subtracted from the totals. With such subtraction made, it is 
estimated that less than 5 per cent of the men called to arms and accepted for 
service incurred physical disability of any sort by reason of their experience. 



64 DEMOBILIZATION 

put through to discharge within forty-eight hours thereafter-^ 
Since sometimes the greater part of a division of troops, or 
even a whole division, reached a demobilization camp prac- 
tically at once, the order meant day and night work for the 
examiners, until they had cleared away the accumulations of 
men. At such times the boards raced with the finance crews, 
the doctors exulting if they passed men faster than the dis- 
bursing officers could make out the pay rolls, and the latter 
crowing when they could twiddle their thumbs and wait for 
men to come from the examination rooms. 

The cash settlement between Uncle Sam the employer and 
his four million soldier employees was a transaction much 
more complicated than would appear at first glance. There 
were many elements to be considered in computing the final 
pay of a soldier, and to determine these elements for each 
man of the four million the pay officers had to make a com- 
plete search of the records each time. 

The records were often voluminous. The private soldier's 
base pay was $30 a month. His records showed when he was 
last paid, and the Government owed him for the interval 
between his last pay day and the date of his discharge, at the 
rate of $30 a month. But perhaps he had been deducting a 
certain amount of his pay each month as an allotment to his 
dependents. He could deduct up to $15 a month, and the 
Government would match him dollar for dollar when it paid 
the allotment to his dependents. At any rate, any allotment 
was deducted from his final pay, too. Was he insured with the 
War Risk Insurance Bureau^ If so, the pay officer deducted 
a premium from each month's pay due him, and the premium 
varied with each man's age. Perhaps he had purchased a 
Liberty Bond through the War Department. In that event the 
monthly partial payment was deducted. Deductions had to 
be made for sickness incurred not in line of duty, or to fulfill 
penalties imposed by courts-martial. After March 1, 1919, 
every soldier was entitled to draw a bonus of $60, and this was 
included in his final pay. Finally the law granted him a mile- 
age allowance at the rate of five cents a mile for the distance 



PROCESS OF DISCHARGING SOLDIERS 65 

between his place of discharge and his home. And this did not 
mean the distance to the railroad station nearest his home, but 
the distance clear home, to his front door, even though he 
lived off in the back country forty miles from the railroad. 
The pay officer had to have at his elbow, not only the tables 
of railroad distances, but also complete road maps of the dis- 
trict served by the demobilization center. 

It should be remembered that pay officers were personally 
responsible for errors in their work, and if the Government 
chanced to lose money as the result of error, the unfortunate 
disbursing officer or his bondsmen had to make it good. In 
spite of the many elements entering into the pay computa- 
tions, the finance crews at the centers grew astonishingly expert 
in making out the pay rolls. It became so that a team of two 
pay officers could enroll names on the pay sheet at the rate of 
two names a minute. 

To accomplish such a result the Director of Finance, in 
whose hands eventually centered all the finance activities of 
the War Department, swept aside hampering regulations and 
precedents and adopted the direct methods of business. This 
impatience of red tape was not better shown than in the treat- 
ment of wounded men in the American hospitals. The regula- 
tions were hard and fast in adherence to the rule that a soldier 
could be paid only upon the representations of facts as written 
into his service records. Wounded men, however, picked up 
unconscious on the battle field, often too sick for months there- 
after to look out for their personal affairs, in thousands of 
instances had lost their service records altogether. The matter 
came to a focus in early 1919 when the finance officer at 
Walter Reed Hospital at Washington reported that there were 
nearly a thousand patients in that institution who possessed 
no records at all to show what the Government owed them. 
The Director of Finance thereupon issued instructions that 
they and all other wounded men in the domestic hospitals 
should be paid off on the basis of their sworn affidavits set- 
ting forth the amounts owed to them by the Government. 
The finance officer at Walter Reed Hospital collected the 



66 DEMOBILIZATION 

affidavits, but, feeling his personal responsibility, hesitated 
to certify the pay roll; whereupon the Director of Finance 
showed his courage by certifying it himself, thus setting a 
precedent which the hospital officers were willing to follow. 

That was one departure from tradition. A more important 
one, because it concerned more men, did away with the indi- 
vidual final statements which all soldiers in the past had been 
required to make when coming up for discharge. The final 
statement was an elaborate form which each soldier filled out, 
at the cost of considerable time and effort. Moreover, the pay 
officers could not work rapidly from these forms. For them 
was substituted the final-payment roll which served for an 
entire company of men and which could be made up quickly 
by the company officers. Working with individual final state- 
ments, a certain demobilization center had been able to dis- 
charge four hundred men a day. As soon as the final-payment 
roll was adopted the same crew at the same camp was able to 
discharge men at the rate of fifteen hundred a day. 

The men who paid off the demobilized troops at the camps 
were trained for the work in a finance service school estab- 
lished immediately after the armistice at Camp Meigs, in the 
District of Columbia. The school graduated some 250 experts 
in army camp finance. These men were distributed among the 
demobilization centers, working in teams of two men each. For 
a long time the work of discharging the Army kept these teams 
at work from dawn until late at night, with never even a 
Sunday as holiday. 

From the pay-roll teams the certified sheets went to another 
set of finance teams for "change-listing." The final payments 
to soldiers were made in cash. The "change-listers" took the 
pay rolls and computed precisely how many bills of each 
denomination, how many half-dollars, how many quarters and 
dimes and nickels and pennies, it would require to pay off all 
the men without requiring one of them to make change at the 
window. The aggregate change lists went to the camp dis- 
bursing officer, and he procured the cash from the nearest 
bank. The banks nearest to some of the camps were miles away 




Photo by Signal Corps 

OVERSEAS TROOPS ENTRAINING AT HOBOKEN 




Felix J. Koch Photo 

VETERANS DETRAINING AT CAMP SHERMAN 




Photo by Signal Corps 

DISCHARGED SOLDIERS RECEIVING FINAL PAY 




^ #^>^ 


^^ '^^ 


ii^ -' 


Jl „,,,v 



Felix J. Koch Photo 

MAKING OUT DISCHARGE CERTIFICATES 



PROCESS OF DISCHARGING SOLDIERS 67 

through desolate country, and sometimes a disbursing officer 
had to bring back in his automobile as much as a million 
dollars in currency. He rode under the escort of a heavy guard 
and was further protected by armed men in his camp office. 
Losses incurred through robbery were insignificant. 

Every morning the disbursing officer turned over to his 
assistants the exact quantity of bills and small change needed 
to cover the payments to be made that day. The men reported 
to the pay office in companies. Their officers called out their 
names one by one, and when each man had verified his cash 
he received his discharge certificate, on the back of which was 
endorsed the amount of money just paid to him in final settle- 
ment. At that moment he was no longer a soldier. He could 
do as he pleased from that time on, but he usually yielded 
to the good influences of those urging him to proceed directly 
to his home. 

The Seventy-seventh Division was paid off and discharged 
at Camp Upton in two days. There were 27,000 men in the 
division as it reached the demobilization camp. The problem 
of the finance officers was simplified by the fact that prac- 
tically all of the men resided in New York City, which made 
it easy to compute mileage. Each man received an average of 
$100, including the bonus, an amount which is probably a fair 
approximation of what was paid to the average overseas soldier 
upon discharge. The advantage of speed in demobilization was 
not all to the soldier. It cost about two dollars a day to main- 
tain a private soldier in the Service. Each day's delay, there- 
fore, in demobilizing the Seventy-seventh Division cost the 
Government $54,000. 

A further simplification of methods resulted in promptness 
in discharging commissioned officers. The disbursing officer at 
a demobilization camp saw all officers in three classes — those 
who in service had been accountable for neither government 
property nor money ; those who had been accountable for prop- 
erty only ; and those who had been in possession of government 
funds. The officers of Class 1 could be paid off finally at 
discharge; but the accounts of accountable officers were sub- 



68 DEMOBILIZATION 

ject to audit, and their final pay was withheld until these 
audits were made. Inasmuch as officers often came up for dis- 
charge with two or three months' back pay due them, the with- 
holding of such considerable amounts of money for an ex- 
tended period imposed a hardship upon them. Under the old 
system it would have been a long time before all of the dis- 
charged officers could have received their final pay. In fact, 
after the termination of every previous war in which American 
emergency troops had ever engaged it was a long time before 
the Government finally settled the pay claims of the account- 
able officers. The accumulation of officers' accounts in the 
spring of 1919 became so great as to make it evident that 
under the existing plan the War Department would be a dozen 
years at least in auditing all of them; which meant — if the 
old audit system were to be continued — that it would be 1931 
before some of the World War officers received their final pay 
for their services. 

The Director of Finance determined to do better than that. 
To be sure, the audit of the property accounts was required by 
law; but instead of continuing the system of auditing them 
in Washington, the Director of Finance arranged for a force 
of field auditors to go to the demobilization centers and audit 
the property accounts as they were presented. The result was 
that the officers responsible for property were enabled to draw 
their final pay with their discharge certificates. 

Officers responsible for government money occupied a dif- 
ferent status, but such officers were relatively few in number. 
The former plan in use required the audit of their accounts by 
the Treasury Department, and it was evident that the Treas- 
ury Department would be a year or more in making these 
audits. Meanwhile none of the discharged officers would be 
able to draw their final pay. This auditing arrangement was a 
requirement, not of law, but of military regulation, which the 
Director of Finance was able to sweep aside, paying off such 
officers finally upon the receipt of statements from them 
accounting in detail for the money which they had handled. 
The Government risked nothing by this innovation, because 



PROCESS OF DISCHARGING SOLDIERS 69 

officers accountable for money were required to give bond to 
indemnify the Government against losses. On the other hand 
the change made it possible for discharged accountable officers 
to receive their final pay within a month after discharge. 

On February 24, 1919, the President signed a bill granting 
a cash bonus of sixty dollars to every soldier who had been in 
uniform before November 11, 1918, The payment of the 
bonus to soldiers still to be discharged after the bonus law was 
in effect offered no difficulty at all, since the camp disbursing 
officers needed only to add the bonus to the final pay of each 
man coming up for discharge. But on February 24 approxi- 
mately 1,600,000 troops had already been discharged. The 
payment of the bonus to these men added measurably to the 
burden of work upon the Finance Service. 

The Director of Finance announced that he would begin 
paying the bonus on March 1. The Zone Finance Officer at 
Washington was designated as the official to pay the bonus to 
officers and enlisted men who had already been discharged. He 
hastily organized an office with about sixty new and inexpe- 
rienced clerks. Meanwhile the newspapers, the Red Cross, the 
American Legion, and all other organizations concerned with 
the welfare of discharged soldiers spread the tidings of the 
bonus payment and urged all discharged men to present their 
claims for it at once. It is doubtful if ever before a national 
publicity campaign reached its mark with such thoroughness 
in such a brief period of time. Claims for the bonus snowed 
upon Washington at the rate of 100,000 a day, and within two 
weeks practically all of the discharged 1,600,000 had filed 
their claims. The pay office grew until it numbered more than 
a thousand clerks. With this force it cleaned up the whole job 
in two months' time. 

Never before had government checks been issued at such a 
rapid rate. It was necessary to make use of the most modem 
labor-saving appliances in accomplishing this record of pay- 
ment. The Bureau of Engraving, which prints the paper money 
for the Government, engraved a special check with the sixty- 
dollar amount printed in, so that it was necessary for the 



70 DEMOBILIZATION 

clerical force only to date the checks, fill in the names of 
payees, and then sign the instruments. The Zone Finance 
Officer himself was the only person in his department author- 
ized to sign checks on the Treasury. However, upon his request 
the Treasury Department authorized five clerks whom he 
designated to sign his name for him. The Treasury further 
authorized the use of the pantograph or multiple signing de- 
vice, which enabled each designated clerk to sign five checks 
with one writing of the signature. On the name line of each 
check was typed in the payee's name, his address, and his 
army serial number. The Zone Finance Officer adopted a 
window envelope through which could be seen the recipient's 
name and address as written on the check inside, and this meas- 
ure saved the great labor of addressing the envelopes. All 
checks were typed in triplicate — one original and two carbon 
copies. Both copies were filed away to be the Government's 
record of the transaction. The cases in which the duplicates 
were filed filled a large room. 

Soldiers of the surname of Smith received 15,200 of these 
bonus checks, and these were only the Smiths among the 
1,600,000 troops discharged before March 1, 1919. If the same 
percentage carried through the rest of the Army, it is evident 
that there were enough Smiths in uniform to make up an 
entire combat division with a sufficient residue over to provide 
the necessar)'^ accompaniment of supply troops. If pushed to it, 
the Smith family could fight a respectable war on its own 
account. But the balance of power is maintained by the Brown 
army. The Brown family collected 9,000 of the 1,600,000 
bonus checks issued from Washington in the spring of 1919. 

Although every effort was made to pay off all troops in full 
at the time of their discharge, there were many men who, 
through their own fault or the fault of those in command of 
them, or else because of conditions over which there was no 
control, failed to receive all of the money rightfully theirs 
when they left the military service. For such men the remedy 
was the claim. A financial claim against the Government is 
notoriously a static thing. At the present day there are Civil 



PROCESS OF DISCHARGING SOLDIERS 71 

War claims still outstanding and unsettled. The Director of 
Finance determined that the World War should leave behind 
it no great body of soldier claimants to haunt Washington and 
nurse their grievances for years to come. Under the ordinary 
procedure the claims of soldiers for arrears of pay had to go 
through the channels of both the War Department and the 
Treasury Department before final payments could be made. 
The Director of Finance sought and, on January 30, 1919, 
received a decision of the Comptroller of the Treasury which 
permitted the former to settle back-pay claims without refer- 
ence to the Treasury Department when there was no construc- 
tion of law involved and the rights of the claimants were 
evident. 

Although the claimants numbered many thousands, the 
number was relatively small compared to the total number of 
men in uniform. At the end of the calendar year 1919, less 
than 5 per cent of the nearly 4,000,000 men who were 
under arms on the first day of the armistice had filed claims 
with the War Department. Three-fourths of the claims were 
for the refund of allotments deducted from pay but for one 
reason or another never paid by the Government to the allot- 
tees; so that only a little more than 1 per cent of the Army 
left the service with claims resulting from errors in soldiers' 
pay accounts. Because of the more intricate financial relations 
between officers and the War Department, the claims of offi- 
cers were greater in proportion, but the officers' claims sub- 
mitted up to the end of the year 1919 amounted in number 
to only 10 per cent of the total number of officers commis- 
sioned. 

The failure of the Government in many instances to pay 
over allotments to soldiers' dependents arose from a multiplic- 
ity of causes. In the first place, the legal method of paying 
allotments changed in the midst of the active part of the war. 
The War Risk Insurance Bureau for many months paid to 
soldiers' dependents the allotments granted by the soldiers, 
plus the amount which the Government added to each allot- 
ment. In June, 1918, Congress enacted a law requiring that 



72 DEMOBILIZATION 

all allotments of this form be paid directly by the War De- 
partment, leaving the War Risk Insurance Bureau to pay only 
those allotments which did not carry government allowances 
with them. The troops were at once apprised of this change; 
but because of the failure of individuals to discontinue their 
deductions to the War Risk Insurance Bureau, or because 
officers, busy with other things, neglected to do it for men 
under their command, or because of the loss of papers in the 
mails, thousands of pay deductions continued to go in to the 
Bureau of War Risk Insurance long after that bureau had 
discontinued paying the allotments to dependents. Out of this 
situation arose thousands of claims from discharged soldiers. 

In other instances allotments were made to persons residing 
in enemy countries or in countries cut off from mail commu- 
nication, Russia being the principal one of the latter class. 
Failures to deliver allotments for this reason resulted in 
claims. 

As to soldiers' pay, there were many reasons why payment 
was not always accurate. Sometimes amounts were withheld 
by the Government erroneously as court-martial forfeitures or 
because of alleged losses of government property. Men upon 
promotion often failed to note on their pay vouchers that they 
were entitled to the advanced pay, and so failed for a time to 
receive their increases. Some failed to receive the increase in 
pay due for foreign service, and some did not get their cash 
commutations of rations and quarters while on leave at the 
recreational areas in France. In all there were fourteen major 
classes of claims for back pay. 

There were claims of still another class — claims for personal 
baggage lost by the Government in transporting the Army. 

Although the individual soldier's affidavit was largely used 
in the settlement of claims, still such a short-cut method of 
arriving at a judgment was permissible only when the official 
records were missing. The gradual concentration of records 
after the armistice, and sometimes the discovery of lost records 
as the disbanding Army cleared up its quarters, often brought 
to light papers that had been missing when the troops were 



PROCESS OF DISCHARGING SOLDIERS 73 

discharged. Every claim submitted involved on the part of 
the Finance Service a search of the records. Since many of the 
records on which the claim depended were in the possession of 
the A. E. F. in France, it was impossible for a long time to 
do much in Washington with such claims. The A. E. F. rec- 
ords returned to the United States in the early autumn of 
1919, but it was several months thereafter before they were 
properly sorted, filed, and made available for research. 

During the first fifteen months after the armistice, the 
claims submitted to the War Department by former enlisted 
men totaled 184,256. Of these, about 64,000 were paid in that 
period, 33,000 declined, and 6,400 transferred to some other 
branch of the Government for settlement — 103,000 claims 
disposed of and 81,000 still in process of adjudication and 
settlement. 



CHAPTER VI 
PICKING UP AFTER THE ARMY 

EVEN in the United States, with its well-developed 
trunk-checking and baggage-transfer systems, the man- 
agement of any considerable amount of personal lug- 
gage gives concern to the traveler. In a foreign land, travel 
with baggage is nothing less than an ordeal ; and the man who 
can convoy a fleet of trunks over a foreign tour and bring them 
all back without loss to the home port, may safely regard him- 
self as an expert globe-trotter. What, then, of the A. E. F.*? 
It was on foreign soil,- in a land where military traffic had 
almost altogether superseded civilian, and the troops had little 
benefit of the services which ordinarily look out for civilians. 
The soldiers, by the nature of things, could not give personal 
attention to their baggage. You might multiply the troubles 
of the individual traveler by the two million men of the 
A. E. F., and still fall short of even half of the baggage 
problem of that organization. 

The baggage problem was one of those unforeseen compli- 
cations which arose to make the task of maintaining the expe- 
dition harder than it had at first seemed to be. It was by no 
means entirely a transportation problem, although whole 
organizations, when advancing toward France, often had to 
leave their baggage behind them to follow by train or ship, 
and this baggage, entrusted to unfamiliar hands, sometimes 
went astray. But the greatest losses occurred in France itself, 
where the troops were quartered. Units were often moved on 
short notice. Expecting eventually to return to the same billets, 
the soldiers left their effects where they were and traveled 
light ; but seldom did it happen that they returned to that area 
again. Other organizations moved into the places thus vacated, 



PICKING UP AFTER THE ARMY 75 

themselves later on to move forward and leave baggage behind. 
In the course of time, literally millions of pieces of American 
military baggage in France became beautifully and thoroughly 
lost. 

This state of affairs called into being a military unit strange 
to our army structure — the Lost Baggage Bureau of the 
A. E. F., established as a branch of the Quartermaster De- 
partment. Before the armistice the Lost Baggage Bureau had 
attempted to do little more than set up certain facilities, 
notably a central baggage depot at Gievres, the Q. M. head- 
quarters of the A. E. F., in which divisions ordered up to the 
trenches could store their excess baggage. This arrangement 
did well enough until the fighting ended, and then for the 
first time the lost-baggage problem began to make its magni- 
tude manifest. After the armistice tens of thousands of 
enquiries about lost baggage began to shower down upon the 
Services of Supply, making it evident that great quantities of 
American property must be scattered throughout the area occu- 
pied by the Yankee troops in France. The little one-horse Lost 
Baggage Bureau gave way to an extensive organization, 
known as the Baggage Service of the A. E. F. The function of 
the new Service thereafter was to manage the transportation 
of all troop baggage during the exodus from France and to 
locate, collect, and if possible restore to its ownership, all bag- 
gage lost by the soldiers of the expedition. 

The Baggage Service went at the problem with a plan drawn 
true to scale. American troops had been quartered at one time 
or another in fifty-nine departments of the Republic of France. 
This great territory the Baggage Service divided for its pur- 
poses into twenty-one zones. In each zone it placed a local 
organization in charge of an officer whose instructions were 
to go over his district with a fine-tooth comb and collect and 
forward to the central office at Gievres all lost articles belong- 
ing to individual American soldiers or to the Army as a whole. 
The search which then ensued not only took in hotels, rail- 
road stations, police headquarters, and other obvious places 
in which lost property might be expected to collect, but it 



76 DEMOBILIZATION 

involved also a house-to-house search of all areas in which 
American troops had been billeted upon the French popula- 
tion. Each day the zone officers sent to headquarters reports 
which contained the descriptions of the articles found. The 
central baggage office took this information and indexed it, 
together with the descriptions of the 90,000 pieces of baggage 
which had accumulated in the Gievres warehouse up to the 
time the armistice began. By May 1, 1919, all of the territory 
occupied by the Americans had been thoroughly searched over 
and cleaned up, and hundreds of thousands of pieces of bag- 
gage, once lost, had been catalogued and stored at the head- 
quarters of the various base sections or in the central ware- 
house at Gievres. 

Although most of this baggage was obviously the property 
of individual soldiers, the search also turned up a great deal 
of government property. This included some twenty rolling 
kitchens in good condition, abandoned for one reason or an- 
other, hundreds of rifles and pistols, numerous helmets, many 
uniforms still wearable, and even bags of mail which had never 
reached destination. The searching parties came upon a lone 
army mule resigned to its apparent fate of ending its days 
as an adjunct to an impressive manure pile in a French 
peasant's dooryard. 

By the time the search was complete and the baggage had 
been collected, the troops were then moving in such numbers 
up to the French ports of embarkation for their passage home 
to the United States that it was found to be impossible to 
restore their lost property to them en route. The Baggage Serv- 
ice in France was able to hand over to their owners only about 
50,000 pieces of baggage. In early June, 1919, it was decided 
to ship all the remaining unclaimed baggage to Hoboken, 
where the owners could obtain it after their return to the 
United States. The baggage thus shipped filled sixty-three 
baggage cars and provided a large part of the lading of an 
entire cargo transport. With the baggage to Hoboken went 
the records from Gievres, to be used by the Lost Baggage 



PICKING UP AFTER THE ARMY 77 

Service at Hoboken in restoring property to overseas soldiers 
returned to the United States. 

The A. E. F.'s Baggage Service, besides finding and caring 
for lost baggage, was charged with the important duty of 
acting as the baggage agent for the returning expedition. 
There was no counterpart to such an organization before the 
armistice. Had there been, the Expeditionary Forces would 
have had practically no baggage problem at all, so far as the 
loss of baggage en route was concerned ; for, on the way home, 
thanks to the new Service, the troops lost scarcely any baggage. 
Here, then, was another new military organization called into 
existence by our experience in the World War; one which 
proved its usefulness and thereby won a place for itself in any 
plans for large military operations in the future. The Baggage 
Service saved its own cost over and over again, for the Gov- 
ernment itself is often responsible for the loss of the personal 
baggage of soldiers and expects to pay in cash the claims pre- 
sented. Indeed, many claims for lost baggage which had 
accrued at A. E. F. headquarters were settled by the restora- 
tion of the baggage itself to its owners. 

In handling baggage for the traveling expedition, the Bag- 
gage Service set up branches at all the important A. E. F. 
troop centers and at all the American embarkation ports in 
France. The function of the baggage men at the troop centers 
was to see to it that when units departed their baggage went 
forward with them, properly marked and routed. The Service 
took charge, not only of organization baggage, but of the 
baggage of individual soldiers as well. At the ports its branches 
acted as checking, storing, and forwarding agents. Brest was 
the largest of our embarkation ports in France, and at Brest 
the official baggage office was operated by five officers and one 
hundred enlisted men. The official "baggage room" at Brest 
was a whole huge warehouse located on one of the jetties. The 
military passengers awaiting embarkation at Brest usually 
numbered well over 100,000, and it took an immense storage 
space to contain all their baggage. 

Officers of the baggage organization met all troop trains 



78 DEMOBILIZATION 

arriving in the Brest area. On these trains were thousands of 
officers and enlisted men traveling alone or in small groups as 
casuals. From these the military baggage agents secured their 
railroad baggage checks, together with cards on which the 
travelers wrote identifying descriptions of their baggage. 
Thereafter the individual traveler had no further baggage 
worries. The Baggage Service secured the pieces from the rail- 
road stations, loaded them on trucks and took them to the 
central warehouse, and then made out index cards identifying 
them and showing their location in storage. These cards were 
made out in the owners' names and filed alphabetically. When- 
ever a transport was preparing to sail, the embarkation authori- 
ties sent to the Baggage Service a copy of the passenger list. 
The baggage people checked over this list against the record 
cards, and were thus able easily to assemble the baggage be- 
longing to the passengers to sail on that ship. The baggage was 
taken out to the transport on lighters, and the canceled iden- 
tification cards were thereupon stamped with the name of the 
transport and the date of sailing and then filed away in the 
dead file. The baggage of organizations was handled in the 
same way, except that the troop units did not abandon the 
practice of sending their own baggage details along with their 
baggage to watch it. These detachments of soldiers remained 
with the baggage at all times, even when it was stored in the 
warehouse. 

The military organization in the United States had nothing 
comparable to the A. E. F.'s Baggage Service to take charge 
of the baggage of traveling troops, but it did have an organi- 
zation to handle lost baggage. This was not a branch of the 
Quartermaster Department, as it was in France, but an agency 
set up by the Transportation Service, an independent bureau 
of the General Staff's Division of Purchase, Storage, and 
Traffic. It was called the Lost Baggage Section, and it oper- 
ated exclusively at Hoboken. Although we had several other 
ports of debarkation for the returning expedition, Hoboken 
was designated to receive all the lost baggage from France. 
When, in late June, Hoboken received the vast accumulation 



<-^ 



A^* •■•-'» 




' "liw '^^ft^^* ■ 



'ij^3 



Photo by Signal Corps 



COMMON GRAVE NEAR CIREY 

(See page 89.) 




Photo by Signal Corps 

LOST MILITARY BAGGAGE AT HOBOKEN 




J i>J'i.j^v^»i^j •_ _fe4'k.%Dr« 




0%u 



\. ^-^^' 



, yv .>, J ■*» 




Photo by Signal Corps 

PREPARING CEMETERY AT BEAUMONT 




Photo by Signal Corps 

LOADING COFFINS ON COLLECTION TRUCKS 



PICKING UP AFTER THE ARMY 79 

of lost baggage which had been stored at Gievres and at the 
base headquarters of the A. E. F., the work of the Lost Bag- 
gage Section began in earnest. One of the great Hoboken pier- 
heads, with its echoing, bamlike storage room and adjoining 
offices, was given over exclusively to the Lost Baggage Sec- 
tion, which put to work more than two hundred clerks to 
handle the voluminous correspondence which sprang up imme- 
diately. Individual owners, their relatives, various soldier- 
relief organizations, and even members of Congress who had 
interested themselves in soldiers, deluged the Lost Baggage 
Section with enquiries. When the armistice was a year old the 
Section had handled 2,000,000 pieces of miscellaneous bag- 
gage, and had succeeded in delivering eleven pieces of every 
dozen received from France. 

In the United States, among the troops quartered at the 
cantonments, camps, posts, and stations of the war-time estab- 
lishment and traveling over the American railroads, there was 
no such baggage problem as had fretted the A. E. F., but never- 
theless there was one of considerable size. Shortly after the 
armistice the Transportation Service took cognizance of an 
accumulation of reports which it had received telling of bag- 
gage, ostensibly the property of soldiers, which was remaining 
unclaimed at railroad stations and at posts formerly occupied 
by troops. It happened that about that time the general bag- 
gage agents of the principal American trunk lines held a con- 
vention in Washington. The Transportation Service seized 
the opportunity of this meeting to request the cooperation of 
the railroads in returning lost baggage to soldiers. The baggage 
agents agreed to secure a complete report from the whole 
United States of all military baggage on hand at parcel rooms, 
express rooms, and baggage rooms. At the same time the 
Transportation Service ordered the commanders of all the mili- 
tary camps in the United States to send to Washington inven- 
tories of unclaimed baggage at the camps. The next step was 
to find out what soldiers had lost any baggage. Newspapers 
and service journals gave publicity to the project of the Trans- 
portation Service, and the various welfare societies added their 



8o DEMOBILIZATION 

assistance, with the result that the Service was able to restore 
hundreds of pieces of lost baggage to their rightful owners. 
Again the United States was saved a considerable sum of 
money which otherwise it would have had to pay out in settle- 
ment of claims. 

One task of the military authorities, similar to the restora- 
tion of lost baggage, but much more delicate and requiring a 
high degree of tact and sympathy in its administration, was 
that of returning to bereaved relatives the baggage of soldiers 
who had been killed in battle or who had died on foreign soil. 
This was so obviously a work of its own kind, requiring men 
peculiarly adapted to the handling of it, that it was placed in 
charge of a special service, both in France and in the United 
States. In France the Effects Bureau, as the organization was 
called, was part of the Quartermaster Department; in the 
United States a bureau of the same name, and virtually the 
successor of the overseas organization, was attached to the 
Transportation Service, and, like the Lost Baggage Section, 
operated exclusively at Hoboken. 

As long as the A. E. F. was in France in force the overseas 
Effects Bureau handled most of this work. It set up headquar- 
ters at the embarkation port at St, Nazaire, and there it 
checked up all the baggage it could find which was the prop- 
erty of deceased soldiers and forwarded it to the United States. 
Many of these effects were found in the general search of 
France for lost baggage, but thousands of pieces were stored 
at military hospitals and with troop organizations. 

The work of restoring the effects to heirs in the United 
States and elsewhere did not attain any great size until after 
the armistice, and then it was handled almost entirely by the 
Effects Bureau at Hoboken. In July and August, 1918, for 
instance, the shipments of deceased soldiers' effects received in 
the United States were fewer than one hundred in number: 
in the month of May, 1919, alone, Hoboken received more 
than 15,000 packages of such effects. By that date the work of 
disposing of this property was engaging the attention of one of 
the largest individual offices connected with the Port of Em- 



PICKING UP AFTER THE ARMY 81 

barkation of New York. All through the summer of 1919 the 
Effects Bureau handled a correspondence that averaged 1,000 
letters a day. 

It was not enough for an officer in the Effects Bureau to be 
well meaning and kindly intentioned — to fit his place, he had 
to possess a rare tact, an instinctive knowledge of what to do 
in circumstances that constantly varied. Early in the episode 
the Bureau witnessed a striking example of how not to deal 
with a bereaved family. One of our aviators had been killed in 
France when his plane crashed to the ground. At the time he 
had in his pocket six 100-franc notes. These were badly 
charred in the flames that had nearly incinerated the airman. 
The misguided effects officer who took charge of the dead 
aviator's baggage, thinking he was doing a kindness, replaced 
the mutilated notes with six new ones and forwarded these 
to the aviator's family, telling in a letter what he had done. 
The family promptly returned the new notes with the request 
that the charred currency be sent instead, because they would 
prize the burned money as a keepsake more highly than they 
would any amount of new money. 

This incident apprised the Effects Bureau, at the outset, of 
the extraordinary value which the relatives of deceased sol- 
diers were likely to attach to the most apparently trifling pos- 
sessions. The men of the Bureau had to understand this fact. 
Moreover, they had to be men of scrupulous honesty. In the 
effects of men who had died abroad was a great deal of money 
in cash, and under the circumstances there could be no check 
upon the people handling this cash. The opportunities of pil- 
fering from the dead were wide open. Consequently the Army 
picked only men of the highest quality to serve in the Effects 
Bureau. 

The Bureau at Hoboken was compelled to accept responsi- 
bility for many unfortunate occurrences in which it was not 
at fault. The procedure behind a letter telling relatives in this 
country of the existence of property which they had inherited 
upon the death of a soldier was approximately as follows: 
after the man died the officers of his immediate organization 



82 DEMOBILIZATION 

made up an inventory of his property; and this inventory', 
together with the baggage itself, eventually reached the Effects 
Bureau. It was usually this original inventory which went to 
the relatives. Often enough, however, the dead man's property 
was not all in his possession when he died. Perhaps he had been 
billeted in villages where he had left souvenirs and other 
cherished but not easily portable trinkets, intending to go back 
some time and secure his property before he started back for 
the United States. He was unlikely to have left among his 
effects any record of these articles; and yet his relatives were 
quite likely to know of the existence of the property from the 
soldier's letters home. The baggage search in France raked 
together a considerable quantity of this property, the owner- 
ship of much of which could not be determined by any iden- 
tifying marks. Consequently, when relatives wrote to the 
Effects Bureau to reproach that service with not having re- 
turned all of the deceased soldier's property the Bureau was 
often able to find the articles among the lost baggage at 
Hoboken. Frequently, however, the Bureau had to confess 
itself unable to locate the lost articles and to bear the brunt of 
any displeasure that followed such an admission. 

After the Tvscania disaster the British authorities shipped 
to Hoboken a miscellaneous collection of unidentified articles 
of value, such as watches and finger rings taken from the bodies 
of drowned American soldiers. It seemed to be an impossible 
task to restore these trinkets to the relatives of the rightful 
owners, but the Effects Bureau nevertheless made the attempt 
to do it. The Bureau wrote letters to all the next of kin to the 
soldiers who went down with the Tuscania, asking them to 
send in descriptions of any articles known to have been in the 
possession of the soldiers when they boarded the ship. The 
replies brought back duplicate prints of photographs carried 
in watch cases, dimensions of finger rings, descriptions, and 
other identifications, which enabled the Bureau to restore 
many of the articles to the proper heirs in this country. 

After an arrival of identified effects in Hoboken, the Effects 
Bureau wrote letters to the immediate relatives or other heirs 



PICKING UP AFTER THE ARMY 83 

of the deceased soldiers describing the property on hand. With 
each letter went a legal form, to be filled out and executed 
before a notary public, establishing the right of the proper 
heirs to receive the effects. Upon the receipt of executed forms, 
the Bureau sent forward the effects at the expense of the 
Government. 

The effects piled up in the Hoboken pier contained many a 
pathetic reminder of the invincible curiosity and enterprise of 
the American boys in France and of their passion for souve- 
nirs of the war. The dead men had collected from almost every 
part of Europe thousands of keepsakes of every description. 
In the baggage of one deceased soldier was found a German 
machine gun which he had acquired in some manner and had 
succeeded in identifying as his personal property. Occasion- 
ally those going over the effects found the contraband loaded 
shell and grenades. These were confiscated and destroyed, be- 
cause of their dangerousness, but all other property was rever- 
ently handled and protected. Because of the complete lack of 
identification for some thousands of parcels, it was impossible 
to make complete restoration of the effects to the heirs of the 
American dead. Nevertheless, by the end of 1919 the Effects 
Bureau had delivered more than 35,000 sets of personal 
effects of deceased soldiers to their families. 

In winding up the affairs of the American Expeditionary 
Forces in France, there was a final, mournful task for the 
Quartermaster Service; one of large proportions and unusual 
difficulty — that of disposing of the soldier dead. During the 
fighting it had been taken for granted by many that the Ameri- 
cans who fell would be interred in great American cemeteries 
in France, to be maintained and kept beautiful forever by the 
American Government; but after the armistice there devel- 
oped in this country, among those bereft of their sons and 
brothers, a powerful feeling that the bodies of these boys 
should be returned to final resting places within the United 
States. The country, or that part of it immediately interested 
in the question, divided into two opposite camps and attempted 



84 DEMOBILIZATION 

to force the War Department into a definite policy one way 
or the other. 

When the aviator Quentin Roosevelt was killed, his father, 
the late Theodore Roosevelt, quoted the words of the rugged 
Old Testament Preacher: "In the place where the tree falleth, 
there it shall be." This was perhaps the strong attitude, and 
a considerable number of bereaved relatives of soldiers felt as 
did Roosevelt; but they were, after all, the minority. Thou- 
sands of mothers, sisters, and sweethearts on the farms and 
in the hamlets, towns, and cities of the United States held 
rather with the poet, Theodore O'Hara: 

"Your own proud land's heroic soil 
Shall be your fitter grave." 

In this contention the War Department took no sides. It did 
not adopt the wishes of the majority as a government policy, 
nor yet those of the minority; but it allowed each bereaved 
family to have its own way. If the family asked for the return 
of the body, that the War Department agreed to. If the family 
were willing to have the body remain buried in France, the 
War Department guaranteed that the grave should always be 
a hallowed and beautiful spot. 

As soon as the A. E. F. began reaching France in force and 
its command realized that American troops were to bear their 
full share of the future fighting, the importance of identify- 
ing the slain and their graves asserted itself as a major prob- 
lem. The experiences of the other armies had not been pleasant 
in this respect, and the command of the expedition did not 
underestimate the difficulties. The British Army, for instance, 
had lost the identification of fully 40 per cent of its dead. 
This was not due to the lack of identification of the dead at the 
time of burial so much as it was to the obliteration of ceme- 
teries by shell fire as the battle front surged back and forth 
over many kilometers of ground. After the American Army 
reached the front in force in the summer of 1918, it never 
knew a major retreating action; its movement was always for- 
ward, and its cemeteries, always in the rear, were never de- 



PICKING UP AFTER THE ARMY 85 

stroyed. The result was that the A. E. F. maintained an 
extraordinarily high percentage of identification. Less than 
2 per cent of its graves, after all the evidence was in, housed 
unknown dead. 

The first step taken by the A. E. F. to accomplish this result 
was to establish, in the summer of 1917, a Graves Registration 
Service in the Quartermaster Department. The original plan 
was for this Service to send out field units to take complete 
charge of the disposition of remains — burying the dead on 
the battle fields and elsewhere, acquiring land for cemeteries, 
keeping the records of burials, and maintaining the cemeteries 
in the future. Sentiment among the troops themselves brought 
about a change in this arrangement. As soon as the divisions 
suffered their first casualties, the comrades of the dead men 
could not bear to have their friends buried by strangers, even 
though the strangers were Americans in the American uniform. 
Consequently G. H. O. modified the original order, saying that 
"the dead must necessarily be buried by the units themselves. 
These units perform this duty as tribute to their dead." 
Thereafter the Graves Registration Service merely recorded 
all burials and grave locations and looked after the graves. 

Such a system was maintained until the early autumn of 
1918. Then the fighting reached its most intense stage, and 
our advancing forces could spare neither time nor energy for 
the proper burial of the slain. At this juncture the field units 
of the Graves Registration Service stepped in voluntarily, 
without waiting for special orders, and assisted in searching 
the ground for dead men and in burying them, enlisting such 
aid in the work as they could find on the spot. This was the 
time of the heaviest American casualties, and the units of the 
Graves Registration Service buried in all some 10,000 dead 
American soldiers. 

The work of the Graves Registration Service was rendered 
particularly difficult by the width and the separation of the 
areas over which the American troops fought. It was not as if 
the front had been a continuous line. Some Americans had 
fallen in Belgium, others with the British at the Franco- 



86 DEMOBILIZATION 

Belgium border, and still others at the southern extremity of 
the line, where it entered Alsace-Lorraine; but most of the 
American casualties had occurred in the Argonne when, during 
the final weeks of the war, the A. E. F. had forced a passage 
of that rough, forested, and traditionally impenetrable terrain. 

In those last weeks in the Argonne the advancing troops had 
been too exhausted to make any thorough search of the battle 
areas for the bodies of their slain comrades. Consequently one 
of the first acts of the command of the A. E. F. after the armi- 
stice was to order an immediate, thorough search of all ground 
where our troops had been in action. Large numbers of divi- 
sional soldiers were assigned to help the Graves Registration 
Service in this work. Through the wreckage and debris of 
the Argonne went the search parties, sometimes finding un- 
buried bodies and frequently bodies poorly and even only par- 
tially buried. To these the Graves Registration Service gave 
proper interment, marking all these temporary graves so that 
the identity of their occupants would not be lost. While this 
was going on, similar searching parties were at work in all 
the other battle areas in which American troops had been in 
action, and still other units of the Service followed up behind 
the Army of Occupation which was advancing through Luxem- 
bourg to the Rhine, in order to discover and identify the graves 
of any Americans who might have died, as prisoners or other- 
wise, behind the former German front. And the searchers were 
not content with a single examination of the ground: they 
went .over every square yard of it three times, the final search 
being a check of the accuracy of the preceding two. Largely to 
the thoroughness of this work was due the completeness of the 
identification of the A. E. F. dead. 

After the widely scattered graves were located, it was next 
the task of the Graves Registration Service to concentrate the 
bodies of the slain into as few cemeteries as possible. The 
American dead had been buried in approximately two thou- 
sand principal places. The concentration of the bodies was 
able to reduce the number of American cemeteries to about 
seven hundred. Not only were the bodies in isolated graves 




Photo by Signal Corps 

I. OVERFLOWED AMERICAN CEMETERY AT FLEVILLE 




Photo by Signal Corps 

2. TWO MONTHS LATER— BODIES ALL REMOVED 




Photo by Signal Corps 

1. ROMAGNE CEMETERY, APRIL lo, 1919 




Photo by Signal Corps 

2. ROMAGNE CEMETERY, MAY 30, 1919 



PICKING UP AFTER THE ARMY 87 

brought in to the concentration cemeteries, but sometimes 
entire cemeteries were abandoned and all the bodies in them 
removed. This was particularly true when the emergency 
cemeteries had been poorly located. The Graves Registration 
Service would not allow even the elements to be unkind to 
the bodies of our fallen soldiers. At Fleville the divisional 
troops had buried a number of their comrades in an emergency 
cemetery located between a small stream and an embanked 
road. During the first winter of the armistice the stream over- 
flowed its banks and flooded the little cemetery, leaving only 
a few crosses sticking up out of the water. The Graves Regis- 
tration Service sent a force of two hundred men to the place. 
In three weeks they had built a dam around the entire cemetery 
and had pumped out the water, after which the bodies of 
eighty-seven Americans were disinterred and removed to a 
better burial ground. 

The sites of the American concentration cemeteries were 
carefully selected by the French Government itself, which set 
up special commissions for that work. Each commission in- 
cluded within its membership various engineers and sanitary 
experts, as well as officers of the American Graves Registration 
Service. The first of the American concentration cemeteries 
was established soon after the action at Chateau-Thierry. 
Most of them, however, were created after the armistice. As 
soon as the site for a permanent cemetery had been secured by 
the A. E. F. and a few of its sections plotted and marked off, 
the Graves Registration Service set labor troops to work dig- 
ging rows of graves, each five feet deep, and at the same time 
started out collection parties to bring in bodies. The concen- 
tration cemeteries gathered bodies in from distances as great 
as fifty miles. While the bodies were being brought in and 
reburied, engineers were at work laying out roads in the ceme- 
tery, grading, and perfecting the drainage, surveyors marked 
off new sections, and landscape gardeners planted shrubbery 
and prepared lawns. 

The work of gathering the bodies fell into a dreary routine. 
Each collection party consisted of an officer and eight or nine 



88 DEMOBILIZATION 

men, and its principal piece of equipment was a motor truck. 
From each cemetery the collection parties ordinarily started 
out each morning before daybreak,* each party taking half a 
dozen empty coffins on its truck. The officer in command had 
with him cards showing the location of the bodies to be dis- 
interred and transferred. Sometimes the party could obtain all 
six bodies from a single place, but more often it was neces- 
sary to visit four, five, or even six places to get the whole 
gruesome load. It was an experience common enough for a 
collection party which had started out before daybreak not to 
get back to the concentration cemetery until after midnight. 
In this way, 20,000 officers and enlisted men, operating 2,000 
trucks, worked for months, until at the end they had visited 
40,000 graves, scattered over 90,000 square kilometers of 
ground, and had removed all the bodies to new graves in 
concentration cemeteries. 

The American concentration cemeteries designed to be per- 
manent resting places for the bodies of such American soldiers 
as are to remain where they fell, are hundreds in number. The 
principal ones, their locations, and the number of American 
soldiers buried in each (December 31, 1919), are as follows: 



Name 




Location 




Number of burials 


Argonne 




Romagne 




23,061 


St. Mihiel 




Thiaucourt 




4,233 


Sedan 




Letanne 




774 


Seringes-et- 


Nesles 


Seringes-et-Nesles 


(Aisne) 


3,792 


Belleau 




Belleau (Aisne) 




2,045 


Ploisy 




Ploisy (Aisne) 




1,954 


Fismes 




Fismes (Aisne) 




1,712 


Juvigny 




Juvigny (Aisne) 




411 


Bony 




Bony (Aisne) 




1,766 


Waereghem 


Waereghem (Belg 


ium) 


689 


Villers-Tou 


rnelle 


Villers-Tournelle 


(Somme) 


549 


Bouvillers 




Bouvillers (Oise) 




297 


Vaux-sur-Somme 


Vaux (Somme) 




234 



* This work was practically all done after the date of the armistice and 
before the advent of spring in 1919 — in other words, during the time of the 
year when the days are short and the nights long. 



PICKING UP AFTER THE ARMY 89 

In addition, 357 Americans were buried in the British mili- 
tary cemetery at St. Souplet, Nord, and 122 others in the 
British military cemetery at Poperinghe, Belgium. 

All of the cemeteries named above were carefully located 
in the first place and carefully planned thereafter, art aiding 
nature in making them fit places for the permanent interment 
of American soldiers. In addition to them there were hundreds 
of others, laid out on a smaller scale, but no less carefully 
planned. When the concentration cemeteries were filled, 
American soldier dead lay sleeping in many American national 
cemeteries on foreign soil — in rugged Scotland, on the Irish 
coast, in peaceful English villages, in sunny Italian fields, 
under the snows of North Russia and of Siberia, in Germany 
and in Austria, and along the whole battle front in France 
and Belgium. 

In its search for bodies the Graves Registration Service came 
upon one common grave at Cirey, a village which had been 
held by the Germans. This grave was marked with a wooden 
cross bearing the legend in German: "75 tapfere AfJierikaner^ 
(15 brave Americans). The French inhabitants of Cirey swore 
under oath that these men had been prisoners massacred in cold 
blood by machine-gun fire. A complete investigation, however, 
made it seem likely that the villagers were merely repeating 
rumors, and led to the conclusion that the Americans had been 
members of a raiding party which, being surrounded, had pre- 
ferred death to surrender. After a long investigation the 
Graves Registration Service succeeded in identifying all the 
bodies in the common grave. All fifteen were given separate 
burials. 

Upon the Graves Registration Service fell the duty of iden- 
tifying the unknown dead, and in this work it rendered one of 
its most valuable services. The work was essentially detective 
work, the following up of clues and the assembling of circum- 
stantial evidence. The case of L — , an aviator, demonstrates 
the methods used. The men of the Service found behind the 
former German lines a grave containing a body which had 
apparently been stripped of every identifying mark. The cross 



90 DEMOBILIZATION 

on the grave designated the occupant thereof merely as "A 
brave American." The graves registration officers, examining 
the body minutely, found, pushed up so high on one arm that 
it had evidently not been seen by the Germans, a wrist watch 
engraved with the name L — . A subsequent investigation 
showed that one L — , an American aviator, had fallen to the 
ground within the German lines at about that spot; and thus 
the identification was made certain. 

A much more remarkable feat was the identification of the 
body of Private Walter L — , a former member of one of the 
infantry regiments of the First Division. Near the isolated 
grave of an unknown American at Ploisy one of the graves 
registration men found on the ground an old, faded, water- 
soaked, and nearly illegible letter addressed to the single name 
"Walter" by one who was evidently a sister living in Cali- 
fornia. The Graves Registration Service communicated with 
this woman and learned that her brother was Private L — , of 
the Infantry. The chaplain of that regiment offered evi- 
dence that L — had been killed in action near the place of the 
unknown grave. Thus another grave was identified. 

Second Lieutenant T — , an aviator, was killed in action 
early in November, 1918. The Graves Registration Service 
found a lonely grave in the commune of Letanne marked 
"Unknown First Lieutenant, A. S., U. S. A." The body was 
examined. The uniform bore the mark of a manufacturing 
tailor at Rochester, New York. A letter to this tailor from the 
Graves Registration Service induced him to make an inde- 
pendent investigation among the retailers who had sold his 
uniforms during the war. About three hundred retail clothing 
establishments answered to his enquiry. Several dealers, judg- 
ing from the description of the dead man, thought they might 
have sold him the uniform; but one retailer in Texas said he 
had sold a uniform to a man answering the description, who 
was then an aviation cadet in training. His name was T — . 
This seemed to the Graves Registration Service to be a good 
clue. Pursuing the line of enquiry in the Air Service, the Serv- 
ice established that T — had been last seen alive flying toward 



PICKING UP AFTER THE ARMY 91 

Letanne, and, since he never returned from that flight, he 
might have been shot down at Letanne. This circumstantial 
evidence together with other corroboratory details, justified 
the Graves Registration Service in identifying the unknown 
dead man as T — . ,^-^ 

Upon the Graves Registration Service fell the duty of com- 
municating with the kinsfolk of fallen American soldiers to 
learn their wishes as to the final disposition of the remains. 
The Service sent out nearly 75,000 letters to the relatives of 
deceased soldiers. In reply 44,000 asked for the return of 
bodies to the United States; 19,000 expressed willingness to 
leave the bodies in Europe ; and some 300 others requested the 
removal of bodies to cemeteries in countries other than the 
United States. The rest did not reply. 

On the first anniversary of the signing of the armistice a 
transport reached New York bringing the bodies of 115 
American soldiers who had died on foreign soil. These bodies, 
the remains of men who had died in northern Russia, were the 
first to come home. The French law prohibited the disinter- 
ment and shipment of bodies until after the expiration of a 
considerable period of time after burial, and for that reason 
the return of remains to the United States did not begin imme- 
diately. At present (1921) frequent shiploads of bodies are 
arriving in the United States. They are received at New York 
and from there they are transported under military guard to 
the cemeteries chosen for their final resting places. 



CHAPTER VII 
SOLDIER WELFARE 

THE World War brought to America a new and en- 
lightened discernment of the Government's responsi- 
bility toward the men whom it had called to the 
uniform. In former wars the military hierarchies had, in effect, 
regarded the individual soldier as a piece of cannon bait; and 
when he was no longer able to serve this purpose, they were 
done with him. In the World War the attitude of the Govern- 
ment toward its four million soldiers was much less imper- 
sonal, much more paternalistic. Its first solicitude was, to be 
sure, the soldier's expertness as a soldier, but after that came 
a real and helpful regard for his physical, mental, moral, and 
economic well-being. 

Particularly was this true after the armistice. Before that 
day the various welfare activities conducted by the Army and 
its auxiliaries had been mainly directed to the end that the 
soldier might be made physically and morally fit as a fighter. 
After the armistice the undertakings in soldier welfare began 
looking to the time when the troops would resume their places 
in the workaday world once more. 

When the fighting stopped, the American Expeditionary 
Forces faced a long interval which was bound to elapse be- 
fore the shipping of the United States could possibly repatriate 
the two million Americans in France. This might easily have 
been a period of stagnation for the temporary exiles. Those 
in command, however, seized the opportunity to establish 
within the A. E. F. a vast school system. Wherever American 
soldiers were quartered in any numbers, classes were organized 
and instruction proceeded, the curriculum including practically 



I 



SOLDIER WELFARE 93 

the entire range of subjects taught in the public schools of the 
United States, from the three elementary R's to the Latin and 
algebra of the high schools. Those who desired it could re- 
ceive instruction in trade and business subjects. As an auxiliary 
to this system the Young Men's Christian Association con- 
ducted at its huts courses similar to those given by that organi- 
zation in its buildings in this country. A surprising amount 
of illiteracy was discovered among the troops raised in 1917 
and 1918, foreign-born soldiers being classed as illiterates if 
they could not read and write the English language, even 
though they might be proficient in reading and writing their 
own. It is estimated that, during this period when the expedi- 
tion was waiting for the ships to take it home, 100,000 men 
of the A. E. F. were taught to read and write English. 

The public school system of the A. E. F., to call it that, was 
rounded out by a great soldiers' university established after 
the armistice at Beaune. In the ranks of the expedition were 
thousands of young men who, in order to join the Army, had 
interrupted their studies in colleges and other institutions of 
higher education in America. For these and for others to whom 
it was practicable to give such training, the General Head- 
quarters of the expedition organized the A. E. F. University, 
occupying French army barracks, schools, and other public 
and private buildings at the town of Beaune. A large faculty 
was recruited almost entirely from the men in uniform, al- 
though a few college professors came from the United States 
to assist in the work. The faculty organized a curriculum which 
in scope would do credit to any large university in the United 
States. About 10,000 soldiers registered as students. Distinc- 
tions of rank ended at the classroom doors, and it was not 
uncommon to see private soldiers conducting classes in which 
sat officers of as high rank as lieutenant colonel. The univer- 
sity's brief career ended with the advent of the summer of 
1919. Colonel Ira L. Reeves was president of the university. 

Besides these educational advantages, the A. E. F. ar- 
ranged for scholarships for some of its men at various French 
and English universities. Practically every university in 



94 DEMOBILIZATION 

France, including the Sorbonne, admitted designated A. E. F. 
soldiers to its classes during that winter and spring, as did also 
Oxford and other famous educational institutions in England. 
Brigadier General Robert I. Rees was in charge of all educa- 
tional activities of the A. E. F. 

Yet it was not all study and work and no play for the men 
of the A. E. F. during the waiting time after the armistice. 
Athletics were organized on a tremendous scale. Near Paris 
the expedition established a great athletic field, called the 
Pershing Stadium. There, in the spring of 1919, were held the 
military athletic championship contests, to which the British, 
French, and other armies of the Allies sent their competing 
teams. Military drilling after the armistice became competi- 
tive in spirit, and out of such competition came the crack drill 
regiment of the Third Army Corps, known as "Pershing's 
Own Regiment," which paraded with the First Division in 
New York and Washington in September, 1919. The drill 
regiment was organized and trained by Colonel Conrad S. 
Babcock. Nearly every division in France conducted a horse 
show after the armistice. The expedition numbered among its 
members men of high talent in almost all callings, including 
that of the stage. At Tours the A. E. F. organized an expert 
theatrical producing company, the performances of which 
equaled in merit the productions seen on the American stage. 
This central troupe also conducted a training school for ama- 
teur actors of the expedition. The various areas in which the 
American soldiers were concentrated sent their local Thespians 
to Tours for training, after which they returned to their sta- 
tions to organize and produce plays. It was a small community 
indeed which did not have its theatrical performances at regu- 
lar intervals. The taste of producers and audiences alike ran 
strongly to musical comedies. 

There was nothing which contributed more to the welfare 
of the men of the American Expeditionary Forces, or to their 
spirit and morale, than the Stars and Stripes^ the service news- 
paper of the A. E. F. This unique adjunct to a modern army 
originated in the ranks, was written, edited, and published by 




Photo by Signal Corps 

COLONEL IRA L. REEVES, PRESIDENT OF BEAUNE 
UNIVERSITY 




Photo by Signal Corps 

STUDENTS AT BEAUNE UNIVERSITY 




Photo by Signal Corps 

ART STUDENTS IN A. E. F. TRAINING CENTER, PARIS 




Photo by Signal Corps 

A. E. F. STUDENTS IN UNIVERSITY OF LYON 



SOLDIER WELFARE 95 

men from the ranks, and to the end of its famous existence was 
primarily and always the organ of the enlisted man, with the 
enlisted man's point of view. No other army in Europe pos- 
sessed an expeditionary newspaper, but it is unlikely that any 
great American army of the future will ever be without one. 
The value of the Stars and Stripes was beyond dispute. 

Three men — Private Hudson Hawley, Field Clerk James 
A. Britt, and Corporal John T. Winterich — were the founders 
of the Stars and Stripes. All three had had training in the 
making of newspapers — Winterich had been one of the edi- 
tors of the Springfield Republican. At Neuf chateau one winter 
night early in 1918 these three foregathered to descant upon 
the growing American Expeditionary Forces and — like the 
fraternity of reporters the world over — to talk shop ; and these 
men agreed that the chief need of the expedition was an agency 
which might put the various American military elements in 
France in touch with each other, tell every man what the 
expanding force was like and what it was trying to do, and 
build homogeneity and singleness of purpose within the expe- 
dition such as no other agency could evoke — in short, the 
A. E. F. needed a newspaper. The idea was communicated to 
General Pershing, who promptly approved it. Thus was the 
Stars and Stripes officially bom. 

The first number was published in Paris on February 8, 
1918, and regularly every Friday thereafter the paper ap- 
peared until June 13, 1919, when it was discontinued, and the 
editorial staff joined the homeward migration. At its summit 
of popularity the Stars and Stripes attained to a circulation of 
526,000, which was close to the permitted limit of one copy 
for every three soldiers in the expedition, a stricture made 
necessary by the shortage of paper in Europe. This was all 
paid circulation, obtained without direct solicitation other 
than the advertising appearing in the paper itself. The Stars 
and Stripes was printed in the Paris plant of the London Daily 
Mail. The total net profit earned by the newspaper was about 
$700,000, a sum which went to the credit of the Quartermaster 
Department. After the armistice the collectors in America 



96 DEMOBILIZATION 

awoke to the historical value of this publication and offered 
large sums for the few complete files which had been saved. 

At about the third issue of the Stars and Stripes Private 
Harold W. Ross, who had had an extensive experience as an 
executive in newspaper offices of the Pacific coast, became the 
editor-in-chief. The three originators of the newspaper were 
on its staff until the end. Sergeant Alexander Woollcott, who 
before and after his army experience was the dramatic critic 
of the New York Times, became the battle correspondent of 
the paper. His accounts of the engagements in which the 
American troops appeared were not excelled by those of any 
correspondent with the Army. After the armistice Sergeant 
John W. Rixey Smith joined the staff. These names all be- 
came well known to the men of the A. E. F. Nor should the 
two artists, C. LeRoy Baldridge and A. B. Wallgren, both 
private soldiers, be forgotten. Their work on the Stars and 
Stripes resulted in fame and fortune for both of them. The 
latter, as "Wally," made himself, with his whimsical nonsense, 
about the most popular figure in the American Expeditionary 
Forces. Baldridge was the possessor of a delicate and subtle 
talent. Practically unknown in his own country before the 
war, he returned after it to take his place among the foremost 
American illustrators. 

These and other men connected with the publication were 
formally organized as a unit of the A. E. F., bearing the name 
1st Censor and Press Company. The officers in charge were 
Major Mark Watson and Captain Stephen T. Early, both of 
them experienced in newspaper work. 

The military authorities granted an extraordinary editorial 
freedom to the Stars and Stripes. At one time the paper was 
making a satirical onslaught against the army practice of 
fencing off the rank and file from the more desirable cafes 
and other gathering places with the placard "Officers Only." 
A high general of the expedition took umbrage at this cam- 
paign and sent to the publication office a peremptory order for 
the attack to cease. The editorial staff at once appealed to 
General Pershing, who replied with a written order that there 



SOLDIER WELFARE 97 

was to be no interference with the editorial direction of the 
S>tars and Stripes. With such a charter the Stars and Stripes 
threw itself whole-heartedly into various projects for the good 
of the A. E. F. and its personnel. Its chief military contribu- 
tion was its "Berlin or Bust" campaign, undertaken in the 
summer and autumn of 1918. In this it directed its energies 
chiefly to the improvement of the unloading efficiency at the 
American ports in France. By citing publicly the labor units 
which made good records in the unloading of vessels, the news- 
paper created, among the stevedore troops, a spirit of com- 
petition which had a marked effect upon the efficiency of the 
ports. The newspaper induced American troop units in France 
to "adopt" for one year more than 3,000 orphans of deceased 
French soldiers, and many of the units continued their guard- 
ianship after they returned to America. In this campaign the 
Stars and Stripes raised over 500,000 francs for the care of 
French war orphans, and most of this money was contributed 
by men in the trenches. The newspaper also conducted a service 
department in which it answered more than 500,000 enquiries 
coming from American soldiers. After the armistice it co- 
operated in the expedition's educational enterprise. 

In this volume, however, we are not so much interested in 
welfare activities within the Army as we are with those which 
bore directly upon the difficult business of demobilizing the 
troops without shock to the economic organization of the 
country. The activities in soldier welfare directly connected 
with demobilization were of two classes — those benefiting the 
sick and wounded and those helpful to the able-bodied. 

To the officers and enlisted men of the Medical Corps in 
this country the armistice meant only an increase of work. 
Therefore, in common with the other military departments 
the personnel of which after the armistice could see no imme- 
diate prospects of discharge, the Medical Department experi- 
enced a sharp drop in corps morale. Many of the officers and 
enlisted men attempted to get out at once, and some of them 
succeeded, but for the most part they were held in uniform; 
and later, when the men realized how badly their services were 



98 DEMOBILIZATION 

needed and what good they were accomplishing, they became 
contented and worked with good spirit until the corps could be 
placed on its permanent peace footing. 

While the Army was expanding, the most noticeable work 
of the Medical Corps in this country had been that of examin- 
ing the men who sought entrance to the training camps, sort- 
ing out the physically fit from the unfit. The care of military 
patients did not become a predominant medical activity in the 
United States until the late summer of 1918, when, simulta- 
neously, the A. E. F. began sending home its first shiploads of 
wounded men and the influenza epidemic invaded the train- 
ing camps. Meanwhile the care of war's disabled had taken on 
a new meaning for the American military medical authorities. 
In former wars, as soon as a sick man or a wounded man had 
gained strength enough to travel, he was usually furloughed to 
his home, there to win his own way back to health if he could. 
In the summer of 1918 the War Department adopted the pol- 
icy of not discharging disabled men from the Service until they 
were as nearly rehabilitated physically as medical science could 
make them; and even then a patient was not turned adrift, 
but might seek the services of other governmental agencies for 
specialized treatment and for reeducation that should enable 
him to take a place in civilian life at least as useful as the one 
he had left in order to join the military service. This policy 
had a marked effect upon the layout of the machinery which 
conducted the demobilization of the Army. It not only re- 
sulted in maintaining the Medical Corps, equipment and per- 
sonnel^ at war strength for many months after the armistice, 
but it also set up within the Government great new agencies 
for carrying out the Government's beneficent purposes toward 
the ex-service men. 

On the day of the armistice there were 200,000 patients in 
the A. E. F. hospitals in France. It was at once realized that 
the best interests of these men demanded their prompt return 
to the United States; for nowhere else could they secure the 
treatment most certain to restore them to complete health. 
The Medical Corps at home was ready for them. For months 



SOLDIER WELFARE 99 

it had been constructing throughout the United States a great 
chain of specialized hospitals in anticipation of a heavy 
American casualty list in France. 

Many of the 200,000 hospitalized members of the A. E. F. 
recovered in time to recross the ocean as members of regu- 
lar military units, but more than half of them returned 
as patients needing more or less extended treatment in 
the military hospitals in this country. The policy in France 
was to move these men either in ambulances or in hospi- 
tal trains from the interior hospitals up to hospitals near 
the ports of embarkation. There they were placed aboard the 
special hospital ships or given accommodations on the regular 
transports. Practically all of them debarked either at New 
York or at Newport News. New York could accommodate 
24,000 patients at once in its regular and special debarkation 
hospitals. The two regular debarkation hospitals in New 
York — one located in the Greenhut Building and the other in 
the Grand Central Palace — each had beds for over 3,000 
patients, and in addition the Army could call upon thirteen 
additional hospitals in New York in an emergency. At New- 
port News there was a regular and emergency equipment of 
10,000 hospital beds for incoming overseas patients. 

Harbor hospital boats and ambulances distributed the 
patients from the ships to the debarkation hospitals. There 
they were classified according to the sort of treatment they 
required. There were eighty interior hospitals which received 
overseas patients. The policy of the Army was to send patients 
whenever practicable to the hospitals nearest their homes. In 
the distribution of patients from the ports to the interior hos- 
pitals, the Medical Corps operated four hospital trains — three 
out of Hoboken and one out of Newport News — and twenty 
unit cars, one of which, attached to a train of regular Pullman 
or tourist sleepers, enabled such a train to serve as a moving 
hospital. Each of the regular hospital trains was made up of 
seven hospital cars, and carried comfortably 141 patients and 
31 doctors, nurses, and orderlies. The unit cars were equipped 
with diet kitchens, in which could be cooked food enough for 



loo DEMOBILIZATION 

250 patients. With this equipment 139,000 overseas patients 
were handled up to the end of the year 1919, and of these, 
103,000 entered the country through the port of New York. 
On the first anniversary of the armistice thirty-six of the eighty 
general hospitals had been closed, an indication of the rate of 
convalescence among the military patients. 

In its treatment of patients in the military hospitals, the 
Medical Department of the Army went beyond the realm of 
pure surgery and medication in order to reconstruct physically 
and mentally, when necessary, the men left disabled by the 
war. To this end it enlarged its Sanitary Corps to include 
persons skilled in physical and occupational reconstruction. 
The plan permitted the employment by the Corps of civilian 
women, who, after putting on the distinctive blue uniform 
adopted for them, were known as reconstruction aides. These 
women were skilled in two branches of therapy — occupational 
therapy (the teaching of new occupations to invalids as a cura- 
tive measure) and physiotherapy (including baths of various 
sorts, massage, heat and electric treatments, and gymnastics). 
Most of the general hospitals were fitted with workshops, 
gymnasiums, physiotherapy departments, and educational 
buildings. An elementary school system was inaugurated at 
the general hospitals, and several thousand illiterate patients 
were taught to read and write during their convalescence. 
Organized recreational activities were conducted at each gen- 
eral hospital engaging in reconstruction. Outdoor games, set- 
ting-up exercises and other gymnastic exercises, military drills, 
and organized play of many sorts vied with concerts, plays, 
boxing matches, and other amusements for the interest of the 
convalescents. One important work of the physiotherapists was 
to teach men with amputated limbs how to dress, feed, and 
otherwise care for themselves, and how to use the artificial legs 
or arms which the Government supplied to them. Nineteen 
former training camps were converted into convalescent centers 
operated by the Medical Department. To these places the 
general hospitals sent 50,000 convalescent soldiers to be 




Photo from Engineer Department 

AIR VIEW OF PERSHING STADIUM, PARIS 




Photo by Signal Corps 

AMERICAN SOLDIERS AT UNIVERSITY OF GRENOBLE 




Photo by Signal Corps 

A. E. F. SOLDIERS AS COMEDIANS 




Photo by Signal Corps 

JUDGING COMEDY HORSE AT 4TH ARMY HORSE SHOW 



SOLDIER WELFARE loi 

finally hardened by curative work and play for their reentrance 
into civilian life. 

After patients were finally discharged from the Army and 
from the army hospitals, the Government by no means washed 
its hands of them. Congress had set up three great new federal 
agencies looking to the welfare of the discharged soldier. One 
of these was the Bureau of War Risk Insurance, which, in 
addition to offering low-priced life insurance policies of the 
standard sorts to all ex-service men, determined, granted, and 
paid the monthly allowances given by the Government to all 
Americans disabled by service in the uniform during the World 
War. Then, too, Congress had greatly enlarged the function 
of the old Public Health Service by making it responsible for 
the medical care of all ex-service men discharged from the 
Army or Navy and from the military hospitals but still need- 
ing attention on account of disabilities incurred during the 
war. Finally, Congress established by law the Federal Board 
for Vocational Education, an act which outdid in gratitude 
and generosity anything which the American Government had 
ever before offered to disabled war veterans. 

After the Public Health Service began expanding its facili- 
ties for the care of disabled veterans, the Medical Department 
adopted the policy of discharging its patients rapidly and turn- 
ing them over to the Public Health Service. Not only were 
those two classes of war victims requiring extended medical 
treatment — the mental and nervous cases and those suffering 
with tuberculosis — so treated, but men still suffering from 
wounds and sometimes requiring major operations and long 
periods for convalescence thereafter were released from the 
Army and committed to the ministrations of the Public Health 
Service. The immediate result of such a transfer was to entitle 
the disabled soldier to receive from the Government his dis- 
ability allowance, which could be paid only after a man's dis- 
charge from the military service, and it often allowed him 
to secure medical care in the vicinity of his own home. 
Another important result was that, during 1920, although 
thousands of the victims of the war still required constant 



102 DEMOBILIZATION 

medical attention, the Medical Service of the Army rapidly- 
contracted toward its prewar proportions, with a consequent 
expansion of the branch of the Public Health Service which 
dealt with disabled veterans. 

There was not nearly so much tuberculosis in the Army as 
the medical authorities had anticipated. In the expectation of 
a wide prevalence of the disease resulting from the severity of 
field conditions in France, the Medical Corps established nine 
tuberculosis hospitals in the United States. Afterwards, al- 
though 100,000 of the 4,000,000 men were sent to hospitals 
as tuberculosis suspects, the positive diagnosis of pulmonary 
tuberculosis was confirmed in less than 15,000 cases. The 
result was that at no time did the Army use more than seven 
of its tuberculosis hospitals, and after it adopted the policy 
of discharging tubercular patients on certificates of disability 
it maintained only two of these hospitals. Discontent and 
homesickness are deterrents to the cure of tuberculosis, and 
the Medical Corps generally allowed sufferers from the disease 
to continue their own cures at home under instructions or to 
enter the hospitals and sanitariums of the Public Health 
Service near their own homes. 

The other class of disabled ex-service men in need of ex- 
tended medical treatment were the nervous and mental cases. 
Such victims were turned over to the Public Health Service, 
and they constituted the largest class of cases treated by that 
agency after the armistice. 

After a disabled man was discharged from the Service, he 
automatically became eligible for vocational rehabilitation 
under the direction of the Federal Board for Vocational Educa- 
tion. The only four conditions were that the man must have 
been honorably discharged after April 7, 1917, that he must 
have a disability incurred in, aggravated by, or traceable to, 
the military service, that the disability must be, in the opinion 
of the Federal Board, an actual vocational handicap to him, 
and, lastly, that vocational training was a feasible thing for 
him. In other words — to clarify the final condition — the Voca- 
tional Board would not give training to a lunatic or give train- 



SOLDIER WELFARE 103 

ing of any sort beyond a man's mental capabilities. Within 
these necessary restrictions, however, there was practically no 
limit to which the Federal Board could not go. Most of its bene- 
ficiaries, to be sure, received training in the purely mechanical 
vocations in shops and factories; but the Board could and did 
send men to colleges and even to the postgraduate schools of 
universities. The objective of the Board was not only to over- 
come by training the man's physical handicap, but also to carry 
him forward in training as long as his progress and his mental- 
ity warranted it. More than one war veteran found that his 
disability brought to him educational opportunities which 
might otherwise never have come his way. The Board possessed 
funds to pay not only for tuition, textbooks, and incidental 
expenses, but also for the maintenance of the student and his 
family, if he had one, while he was in training. According to 
the number of persons dependent upon the student, the Board 
was authorized to pay for maintenance as much as $150 a 
month. At first the disabled men were slow to make application 
for vocational training; but, once they understood the advan- 
tages which were theirs for the asking, there was a great rush 
to avail themselves of the opportunities thus freely offered by 
the Government. 

The three rehabilitation services, though interdependent in 
their operation, were independent of each other in their man- 
agement and control. The Public Health Service conducted 
the physical examinations on which the War Risk Bureau 
rated men for their disability allowances. The War Risk 
Bureau certified men to the Public Health Service for medical 
treatment, and for vocational training to the Federal Board for 
Vocational Education. A man could not legally receive his 
disability allowance from the War Risk Bureau while re- 
ceiving a training maintenance allowance from the Federal 
Board. While in effect, therefore, conducting three branches in 
the single main enterprise of caring for the men left disabled 
by the war, the three federal agencies were independent in their 
executive managements. This anomalous arrangement resulted 
in such distressing delays and stirred up so much discontent 



104 DEMOBILIZATION 

among the ex-service men that in the spring of 1921, upon the 
insistence largely of the American Legion, the veterans' own 
organization, the three services were brought together under 
a single direction. 

The agitation which led to the amalgamation of the three 
welfare services undoubtedly created a wide impression that 
the Government had neglected the ex-service men. Nothing 
could have been farther from the truth. The complaint was 
not against the generosity of the Government, but against the 
method of administering that generosity. It was often difficult 
for the ex-service man to obtain the benefits which Congress 
had provided for him. The lavishness of the hand of Congress 
is shown by the fact that up to the present (June, 1921) its 
appropriations of money for ex-service men have amounted in 
sum to about $800,000,000. This is more money than the Gov- 
ernment provided for veterans of the Civil War during the first 
thirty years after the conclusion of that conflict. The appro- 
priations to date include the money for the physical and voca- 
tional rehabilitation of disabled World War veterans, for 
death claims paid by the Bureau of War Risk Insurance, and 
for allowances paid by the War Risk Bureau to disabled ex- 
soldiers, but they do not include the sixty-dollar bonus paid 
to all ex-service men in 1919. This bonus accounted for about 
$200,000,000 of the Government's money. Altogether, there- 
fore, the Government has either paid out or obligated itself to 
pay out about one billion dollars for the benefit of men who 
served in the American forces during the World War. 

So much for the post-armistice care of the wounded and 
otherwise disabled. The other principal phase of welfare work 
for the Army after the armistice had to do with the able- 
bodied soldiers; and, concretely, it meant getting jobs for them. 
The War Department did not regard a soldier as completely 
demobilized until he was once more placed in an occupation in 
civilian life. The Department could exercise no authority over 
the veteran once he had received his discharge, but it could and 
did exercise a friendly solicitude as to his economic future. 
Therefore the War Department led a nation-wide movement 



SOLDIER WELFARE 105 

under the slogan, "Jobs for Soldiers" — and that meant jobs 
for approximately 4,000,000 men thrown suddenly into the 
labor market just at the time when industry was going through 
the critical transition from war to peace. 

In demobilizing the men of the Army, the War Department 
adopted a policy the diametric opposite of the British policy 
of discharging soldiers by trades as they were needed in indus- 
try. With our enormous and varied industry, we had every- 
thing in our favor to make a success of the industrial plan of 
troop demobilization; but, nevertheless, the War Department 
settled upon the questionable policy of discharging the troops 
by military units, regardless of the effect such a policy might 
have upon general industrial conditions. As it was, the United 
States faced an economic crisis in the transition of its war 
industry, and to inundate the country with unemployed ex- 
soldiers was only to add to the difficulties of those who were 
trying to bring industry safely through the readjustment. 
Later on, the War Department modified its policy by provid- 
ing that any soldier who faced unemployment after discharge 
might, upon his own request, be held in the service for a rea- 
sonable time while he tried to locate a job for himself in 
civilian life, and that, on the other hand, if work were waiting 
for any man not yet in line for immediate discharge, such a 
man might, upon submitting proper proof that there was a 
civilian demand for his services, receive his discharge forth- 
with. The Department permitted officers to take thirty-day 
leaves of absence with pay while they sought work. 

There was, of course, danger that the wholesale outpouring 
of ex-soldiers upon an industrial field already complaining 
of a labor surplus would precipitate a business crisis; yet it 
seemed certain that a wise guidance of the internal affairs of 
the nation could avert such a calamity. The world was short 
of almost everything which man consumes, and it seemed 
evident that it would take several years of brisk production in 
every field to build up the reserves wasted by war and overtake 
industrially the demands of the consuming public. It was 
evident, in short, that there was plenty of work for all, if busi- 



io6 DEMOBILIZATION 

ness did not become hysterical in the face of a difficult transi- 
tion. The part for the Government to play was to conduct a 
skillful graduation of war industry into the pursuits of peace 
and at the same time to take the lead with its own agencies 
in infiltrating the demobilized troops into the ranks of trade 
and industry. 

Fortunately, for this latter purpose, the Government pos- 
sessed an agency at hand — the United States Employment 
Service, a branch of the Department of Labor. The war had 
built up this organization to great size and usefulness. Its 
branches covered the United States. Before the armistice it 
had been instrumental in staffing some of the more important 
war industrial establishments, particularly the new shipyards 
and the government powder plants. This agency would have 
been competent alone to secure employment for all discharged 
soldiers, but for the circumstance that, in the spring of 1919, 
there came into office a Congress of a political complexion the 
opposite to that of the administration. This Congress at once 
adopted a program of economy, but it was a spurious economy 
to tiie extent (which was considerable) that it arbitrarily cut 
down appropriations needed for important projects. The 
United States Employment Service received a scant $5,000,- 
000 with which to finance the work of securing civilian em- 
ployment for 4,000,000 men, when twice that sum would 
not have been overabundant. The result was that in this final 
scene of the war the Government was forced to call upon out- 
side and volunteer aid in the conduct of an essential war 
activity. 

At this point the semi-governmental Council of National 
Defense stepped into the breach. Shorn of most of its purely 
industrial functions, the Council of National Defense had be- 
come largely an organ consolidating and directing all volun- 
teer civilian effort in aid of the Government in its war and 
demobilization problems. It had built up a field service cover- 
ing the entire United States, consisting principally of the state 
and local councils of national defense. Meanwhile, with the 
expansion of the United States Employment Service restricted 



SOLDIER WELFARE 107 

by lack of money, the Secretary of War made plans to use 
some of the emergency war funds in the soldier-employment 
project and called to Washington Colonel Arthur Woods, the 
former police commissioner of New York City, making him an 
assistant to the Secretary of War in charge of all war depart- 
ment activities in reestablishing service men in civil life. The 
Director of the Council of National Defense created, in March, 
1919, its emergency committee on employment of soldiers and 
sailors, with Colonel Woods as chairman. The membership of 
the committee linked up the United States Employment Serv- 
ice and other interested governmental bodies in an emergency 
organization for Colonel Woods to command. The committee 
also tied in all state and municipal employment agencies, wel- 
fare societies everywhere that were taking part in the solution 
of the employment problem, and also the thousands of com- 
munity councils of national defense. Thus was evolved in 
brief time a fairly efficient employment service of national 
scope. 

The success of the project was beyond question. The so- 
called bureaus for discharged soldiers, sailors, and marines 
were set up in practically every community in the United 
States. Since the work was so largely voluntary work, no 
strict system of reports was ever put in force, but the figures 
from 500 principal American cities and towns showed that 
when the year 1919 ended, 1,326,000 discharged service men 
had applied to the employment agencies, and more than 927,- 
000 had been placed in jobs by the organization. A general 
survey in the autumn of 1919 disclosed only about 20,000 
ex-service men out of work. 

The men of the A. E. F. came in contact with the Govern- 
ment's employment organization before they left foreign soil. 
The United States Employment Service sent several represen- 
tatives to France soon after the armistice. These advance 
agents carried cards, which were distributed to the troops of 
the expedition as they came to the embarkation ports in 
France. With the cards went the Government's assurance that 
it would use every effort to restore every soldier to a useful 



io8 DEMOBILIZATION 

place in civil life. Any soldier who desired to avail himself 
of these good offices was instructed to fill in a card during his 
voyage home, telling his qualifications, what sort of job he 
desired, and where he wished to be employed. Hundreds of 
thousands of these cards were collected by the federal em- 
ployment agents at the ports of debarkation in this country. 
The cards were sorted and sent to the proper local employment 
bureaus throughout the United States. Thousands of men were 
engaged for work before they received their discharges. The 
fact that jobs were waiting for them undoubtedly helped to 
avert the congregating of idle service men in cities after they 
had been turned off at the demobilization centers. 

The overseas soldier had been serving his country for a 
dollar a day while others had stayed at home in bomb-proof 
jobs and drawn the highest wages ever paid in America. The 
returning veteran often felt, and felt justly, that it was his 
turn now to reap some of the financial rewards. Travel had 
broadened these boys ; the harsh experiences of war had sobered 
them and often quickened their ambition. Such men were not 
content to go back to the jobs they had left in 1917 and 1918. 
They demanded something better, and often they got it, be- 
cause employers were prone to accept their point of view. 
Events justified this attitude, too, as was testified to in hun- 
dreds of letters received by the employment bureaus from satis- 
fied employers, who wrote that the demobilized soldiers were 
better and more ambitious workmen for their war experiences. 

The success of the reemployment campaign was largely an 
achievement for publicity. The publicity was directed both to 
the soldier and to the employer. For reaching the soldier one 
of the most valuable devices proved to be a booklet entitled 
Where Do We Go from Here?^ written by Major William 
Brown Meloney. This pamphlet was filled with good advice 
for the demobilized soldier. It took into account his stirred 
ambition, but showed how impossible it was for every man to 
get the place in civil life he desired, and therefore urged each 
man to take what job he could get and make the most of it. 




Photo from Federal Board for Vocational Education 

DISABLED VETERANS TAKING FEDERAL TRAINING 




Photo by Signal Corps 

EDITORIAL CONFERENCE OF STARS AND STRIPES 




PUTFICH'IINC; Bl,(30n IN \0' ■' "■ '-'^^"^^ 



+ A, 



Ml Kl ' IIIN kl I ( )Ki) 
1 1 IB 



Photo by Signal Corps 

POSTER USED IN REEMPLOYMENT CAMPAIGN 




Felix J. Koch Photo 

EMPLOYMENT OFFICE AT CAMP SHERMAN 



SOLDIER WELFARE 109 

The War Camp Community Service printed and distributed 
3,000,000 copies of this booklet. 

The American Red Cross sponsored a poster by Dan Smith, 
the artist, bearing to employers the slogan: "Put Fighting 
Blood in your Business !" A file of helmeted Yanks obliquely 
below a shield on which were inscribed the names of the prin- 
cipal engagements in which the A. E. F. participated; below 
that, the lines: "Here's his record. Does he get a job'?" — such 
was the display. 

Publications of every sort, motion picture theatres, minis- 
ters in their pulpits, and school-teachers in their classrooms 
joined in the effort to make the whole United States think of 
its obligations to the returning troops. The War Department 
conferred a so-called citation upon employers who agreed to 
take back all of their former employees who had joined the 
Army or Navy, The leading business organizations of the 
country worked with their members to secure a complete re- 
employment of former service men. The thoroughness of the 
effort accounts for the large degree of its success. 

At the same time the War Department constituted itself 
an employment agency for placing soldiers with technical 
training in the best positions that could be obtained for them. 
Such soldiers were usually commissioned officers. The Depart- 
ment asked these men to send to Washington statements of 
their qualifications and their wishes as to employment. The 
Department then circularized some 25,000 business firms of 
the United States as to their needs for men with technical 
training. By this method about 8,000 men were placed in 
responsible positions at good salaries. 

The employment organization encountered and overcame 
an abuse of the army uniform that was particularly flagrant 
for the first few months after the armistice. On the streets of 
most large cities were men in uniform, wearing the red chev- 
ron indicating their honorable discharge from the service, sell- 
ing cheap or worthless articles or begging outright. There may 
have been a shadow of excuse for this during the early weeks 
of the winter of 1918-1919; but as industry recovered and 



no DEMOBILIZATION 

revived it became possible for every ex-service man who de- 
sired a respectable job to secure one. Street solicitation, how- 
ever, was highly profitable, and many professional beggars 
and sharpers, who had never been in the Service at all, secured 
uniforms and posed as discharged soldiers. The American 
Legion instituted a campaign against these men, urging the 
public not to give money to them. The reemployment forces 
persuaded local authorities to refuse peddling licenses to men 
in uniform. Thus the evil was largely stamped out after a 
few months. 

Not even the assurance of an immediate job and the other 
official inducements which made the road home the path of 
least resistance could always induce the discharged soldier 
to go home directly, particularly if he left the demobilization 
camp with his pockets full of money. Around some of the 
demobilization centers ranged bands of thieves and outlaws 
who, having evaded military service, now during the demobili- 
zation wore the army uniform and posed as discharged soldiers 
in order to prey upon the ex-service men. If a soldier leaving 
the camp listened to their fraternal "Hello, Buddy!" and fell 
in with them, he usually later found himself fleeced to his last 
penny. To offset this evil the American Red Cross established 
a chain of soldiers' banks at the principal demobilization cen- 
ters. In these banks the discharged men could deposit their 
money, drawing it out by check after they reached their homes. 
The deposits in the camp banks passed $4,000,000 in amount. 

In one respect only was the reemployment campaign unsuc- 
cessful. The War Department had hoped to use the demobili- 
zation of troops as an offset to some extent to the steady drift 
of population from American farms to the cities. In pursuance 
of this ambition the Government distributed among the troops 
at the demobilization centers nearly 1,000,000 copies of a 
booklet entitled Forward to the Farm! Why Not? Yet, al- 
though most country boys in the Army were willing to return 
to the farms, the Government could not induce the city dwell- 
ers to take up country life. However, it is noteworthy that in 
June, 1919, when the Kansas wheat crop was in danger for 



SOLDIER WELFARE in 

want of labor to harvest it, the reemployment organization 
was able to send nearly 50,000 ex-service men into the Kansas 
wheat country during the harvest at wages of $5 to $7 a day, 
lodging and board thrown in. 



CHAPTER VIII 
WAR CONTRACTS 

OF all the business activities of the American Govern- 
ment in the World War, none aroused in the business 
men of America more interest or more concern than 
the Government's employment of its function of making con- 
tracts with industry for the production and delivery of war 
supplies. There is little danger of putting too much emphasis 
upon the importance of the war contract. After the declara- 
tion of war, the Government rapidly assumed unprecedented 
powers over business, until in the heavy productive months of 
1918 it occupied a supreme position. The War Industries 
Board had virtually commandeered all important raw mate- 
rials and was distributing them at fixed prices. The Govern- 
ment had become the sole dealer in wool; it was closely regu- 
lating the prices of, and determining priorities in the use of, 
such commodities as copper and steel; through the United 
States Fuel Administration it was in full control of the pro- 
duction, distribution, and use of fuels; and its position was 
equally monopolistic toward all other important basic mate- 
rials. Of the labor, the machinery, and the processes which 
normally manufactured these materials into the commodities 
of American commerce, the Government had become almost 
the only employer; only now it had woven these facilities, the 
industrial facilities of the largest of industrial nations, into the 
intricate texture of an arsenal. Mechanical industry for pri- 
vate enterprise had almost disappeared. On the day of the 
armistice the factories of the United States were working prac- 
tically as a unit in the production of munitions. While the 
Navy, the United States Shipping Board, and the military 
missions of the principal Allies were also prosecuting extensive 
war industrial projects in America, the War Department alone 



WAR CONTRACTS 113 

had entered into some 30,000 contracts directly with builders 
and producers, these contracts upon their consummation obli- 
gating the Government to pay out a sum in excess of $7,500,- 
000,000. Of this production, less than half (reckoning it in 
money value) had been completed on the day of the armistice. 

It follows that the instrument which commanded and set 
in motion all this effort — the war contract — must have been 
a thing exceedingly important to America. The 30,000 war 
department contracts, as a body, constituted in themselves 
the charter under which the preponderant part of American 
industry existed for nearly two years. As wisdom or unwisdom 
appeared written into the provisions of the war contracts, so 
fared well or badly not only the half of the population directly 
associated with industry, but the other half as well, and the 
Government, too. As an example, it was charged with some 
degree of justice that one great class of war department con- 
tracts, the so-called cost-plus contracts, was the chief factor 
in the rapidly mounting cost of living during the war. In other 
ways also these writings, which defined the terms of existence 
for American industry, profoundly affected every person in 
the United States. We may leave to lawyers and economists 
the discussion of the academic legal questions involved in the 
war contracts and still find in them plenty of interest common 
to all. 

When an individual person goes out to buy anything, he 
normally procures it by paying the price fixed by the seller. 
Business houses, too, commonly follow this custom in procur- 
ing their usual supplies. If, however, the individual person or 
business house is going into some relatively large operation 
in which he will require goods and services in extensive quan- 
tity, then it is customary to ask for bids from those in a posi- 
tion to supply the needs, and to contract thereafter with the 
concern which offers to supply the goods and services at the 
best price. The law requires the Government to follow this 
procedure in procuring practically all its supplies. Each fed- 
eral department must advertise its needs publicly, giving com- 
plete specifications, must call publicly for bids to supply the 



1 14 DEL.OBILIZATION 

materials specified, and must allot the business to the one 
tendering the best bid ; provided only that the bidder is respon- 
sible and is known to have the ability to produce goods of the 
quality desired. The courts have held that a contract written 
under any other conditions is void. 

The law, however, permits certain exceptions. The War 
Department, for instance, is permitted by law to increase the 
size of a contract already properly made. It can deal directly, 
without advertising, with a manufacturer who is a sole source 
of supply, provided that previous advertising has elicited no 
bids. These exceptions are the reflection of experience in gov- 
erning, exceptions granted by Congress to the end that the 
Government's necessary business may not be impeded by the 
operation of the legal checks and balances. 

Now there was to the federal contracting rule one other 
exception which was, for our purposes here, the most important 
of all. The law authorized the Secretary of War to enter into 
contracts without the formality of advertising and soliciting 
bids, in the event of a national emergency. We had not yet 
been a week at war with Germany when the Secretary of War 
issued proclamation declaring such an emergency to exist. His 
signature to this document swept away the most serious legal 
restrictions which circumscribed the War Department's con- 
tracting powers. The hand of the Department had been fur- 
ther strengthened by the National Defense Act (passed in 
1916), which empowered the Secretary of War, "in time of 
war, or when war is imminent," to command a manufacturer 
to produce supplies for the United States at prices fixed by 
the War Department itself; and if the producer refused this 
arrangement, then the Act empowered the Secretary to com- 
mandeer and take over the producer's business, paying the 
producer, however, a fair and just compensation. 

Competition for the Government's contracts under the 
normal procedure would have been fatal to both speed and 
secrecy in the procurement of war supplies, and therefore the 
law wisely permitted the War Department to abandon com- 
petition in the emergency of war. But, with the safeguard of 



WAR CONTRACTS 115 

the competitive bid abandoned, it is reasonable to suppose that 
the officers of the War Department, if they were faithful serv- 
ants of the public, would seek to protect the Government 
against the extortioner by the substitution of other devices not 
open to the objection either of delaying the war manufactur- 
ing program or of betraying its nature and extent. And so they 
did. And although the methods of applying the protection were 
numerous, the essence of it was that the contractor was re- 
quired by the terms of his contract to produce war supplies at' 
cost, plus a profit for himself, the profit being reckoned in 
various ways. A contract of this sort was known as a cost-plus 
contract. Contracts of the normal, older sort, in which the 
Government dealt with the lowest bidder or with a producer 
with whom the law empowered the federal purchasers to deal 
directly without competition, were known as fixed-price or 
lump-sum contracts. 

The cost-plus contract was not entirely unknown to Ameri- 
can business before the war, but it had been employed only 
sparingly. The war brought the form into great prominence, 
since much of the most important war business was conducted 
on the cost-plus plan. It is noteworthy that the form has per- 
sisted to some extent in American private business, and par- 
ticularly in the building industry, since the armistice. 

Although under the circumstances the cost-plus contract was 
a necessity and its advantages were many, nevertheless the 
form was endowed with an inherent weakness (from the Gov- 
ernment's standpoint) most difficult to overcome. In a lump- 
sum contract the profit of the contractor increased according 
as he was able to keep down his costs. If his costs ran too high, 
he faced actual loss. In the cost-plus contract of the simplest 
form — cost of production, plus a percentage of the cost as 
profit — it was just the other way. The higher a producer's 
costs, the greater his profit; and though a producer might not 
deliberately seek to augment his costs, yet if he were relieved 
of the necessity of maintaining a normal business wariness, 
bargaining for his raw materials, and resisting wage advances, 
the best interests of the Government might not be served. 



1 16 DEMOBILIZATION 

There is no question that the elementary form of cost-plus war 
contract in the early months of the war added considerable 
impetus to the procession of higher costs of living, higher 
wages, and higher costs again in the vicious circle. It was to 
retard this tendency, to add an inducement to the producer to 
control and keep down his costs, that the Government evolved 
the many modifications and refinements of the cost-plus con- 
tract. 

At several points in these narratives we have called atten- 
tion to the train of evils which followed the attempt of the 
War Department in 1917 to conduct its enterprise in the pro- 
duction of munitions with an organization feudal in character 
and, one might almost say, in antiquity. Five virtually inde- 
pendent bureaus — the Ordnance Department, the Quarter- 
master Department, the Corps of Engineers, the Signal Corps, 
and the Medical Department — and, later, after the creation 
of the Construction Division, the Air Service, and the Chemical 
Warfare Service, eight, set forth to procure their own war 
supplies as competitors, each determined to attain its own 
ends at the expense, if necessary, of the others. This plan of 
operation soon drew up near the edge of disaster, as factories 
and the more accessible industrial districts were overloaded 
with war contracts by the undirected distribution of the Gov- 
ernment's business, and transportation both on rail and ocean 
was nearly throttled by the congestions of freight at various 
seaboard and inland terminals. 

Here again, in considering the war contracts, we stumble 
once more across the trail of this faulty organization. The war 
contracts were practically as diverse in their provisions and 
types as the Government's contracting agencies were numer- 
ous; and here it should be noted that some of the main 
procurement bureaus were in turn subdivided into smaller 
purchasing agencies, each of which drew its war contracts 
according to its own lights. About all the early war contracts 
had in common were the legal provisions protecting the Gov- 
ernment against fraud and graft. There was no such thing as 
a standard contract, and no uniformity anywhere. The Gov- 



WAR CONTRACTS 117 

emment was being obligated in contracts to the tune of bil- 
lions by contracting officers almost out of touch with the 
responsible heads of the administration. 

The Government was soon forced to take cognizance of this 
state of affairs. In the spring of 1917 the Secretary of Com- 
merce convened the so-called Interdepartmental Conference to 
consider the war contracts — the first attempt to bring har- 
mony into the confused business situation. To the conference 
came the representatives of the various departments, boards, 
and administrations interested in contracts, and to the sessions 
of the conference also the opponents of the cost-plus contract 
brought their objections to it. There were those who held it 
almost solely responsible for the great increase in costs of all 
sorts during 1917. 

It was soon evident to the conferees, however, that the cost- 
plus contract had come to stay in the war business, regardless 
of its obvious dangers and disadvantages. If an evil, it was 
a necessary one. True, the Government could still go into 
fixed-price contracts for the procurement of many important 
war supplies. These were such supplies as food, clothing, and 
tools — commodities essentially like those produced and con- 
sumed in time of peace. The producers of these commodities 
were not perplexed by costs ; their facilities and processes were 
ready to begin production ; and therefore the War Department 
could, and did until the end of hostilities (except when short- 
ages made it necessary to deal with single responsible manu- 
facturers in order to gain early deliveries), procure such sup- 
plies on fixed-price contracts let after competitive bidding. 
But such supplies, although they bulked large in the cash 
balance, contributed little to the solution of the main muni- 
tions problem. It was in the production of artillery, of air- 
planes and airplane engines, of ammunition, of explosives, 
even of buildings in which to house the war department enter- 
prises, that the cost-plus contract had become a necessity. 

There was no way of telling in advance what would be the 
costs of producing these more important supplies. Many of 
them were of types and designs entirely new to American 



1 18 DEMOBILIZATION 

manufacturing experience. It was hard enough for the gov- 
ernment agents to induce manufacturers to undertake these 
contracts even on a cost-plus basis. Had the War Department 
attempted to advertise the specifications of such a mechanism 
as the French hydropneumatic recuperator, it would never 
have received a bid. The only possible terms on which any 
sane manufacturer would take such a contract would be the 
payment of his costs, plus a profit. 

Many of the contracts for the more difficult sorts of supplies 
were bound to continue over an extended period before all the 
deliveries could be made. It was often impossible for such 
contractors to make commitments in advance for all their raw 
materials. Therefore they faced a rising market and prices 
which they could not predetermine. They also faced almost 
certain increases in the wages paid to their employees ; yet here 
again they could not anticipate what these increases would be. 
The costs of a maker of optical instruments for the Army de- 
pended partially upon what he should have to pay for optical 
glass, but the glass was to come from a new war industry which 
had not yet begun production and therefore could not estimate 
what it would charge for glass. With its designs for war im- 
plements the War Department did the best it could, founding 
its specifications upon the latest and best information at its 
command. Yet so rapid was the evolution of war materials 
resulting from their intensive use that sometimes the Depart- 
ment found a design obsolete before its production was fairly 
begun. Its designers therefore made changes in the specifica- 
tions at the factory, and these changes involved heavy manu- 
facturing costs. Every contractor knew that his work was to be 
subject to such changes in the specifications; yet no one could 
foretell whether changes would be made or what they would 
cost. 

These purely manufacturing considerations were enough in 
themselves to explain the prevalence of the cost-plus contracts. 
Another element was the time required to prepare specifica- 
tions and advertise for bids — time not to be spared in war. 
But there was still another reason to account for the cost- 



WAR CONTRACTS 119 

plus contract, a reason in war finance, even more cogent. The 
successful prosecution of the war meant that practically the 
entire industrial equipment of the United States would have 
to be devoted to the production of war supplies. Before the 
war only large concerns with great financial resources were able 
to put through great government projects in which the delivery 
dates were far removed from the dates of starting the work. A 
war contract often involved a tremendous preliminary expen- 
diture of money in factory expansion and in commitments for 
raw materials. The Government's practice was to pay for sup- 
plies only upon their delivery. Under such conditions the small 
manufacturer could not work for the Government. In normal 
times, perhaps, the possession of a government contract might 
have enabled him to finance his operation through the banks 
in the usual way, but with every manufacturer needing special 
financing, the effect upon the banks was to make them less 
liberal in their commercial loans. The banks had their own 
solvency to look out for first. 

The cost-plus contract proved to be one of the solutions of 
this problem. Most of the cost-plus contracts provided that the 
War Department could pay the manufacturing costs as they 
accrued, in installments. Thus, by securing partial advance 
payments from the Government, the small producers, and the 
large, too, were able to finance their projects and even to take 
advantage of the cash discounts in their purchases of raw mate- 
rials. Naturally, the War Department was careful to make 
such arrangements only with contractors of recognized prob- 
ity, men who were deserving of confidence, but who often 
lacked working capital to enable them to become successful 
producers of war supplies.* 

The Interdepartmental Conference, far from disapproving 
or attempting to abolish the cost-plus contract, recognized its 

* The financing of war factories, and particularly of those which had to 
make large and expensive plant additions before manufacturing could proceed, 
was effectively aided by the War Credits Board of the War Department. In 
the autumn of 1917 Congress authorized the War Department to advance to 
contractors amounts up to 30 per cent of the total contract obligations. The 
War Credits Board administered this work. In all, it lent to war department 



1 20 DEMOBILIZATION 

necessity, but registered a preference for forms of it which best 
protected the interests of the people and of the Government. 
The elemental cost-plus contract obligated the Government to 
pay manufacturing costs, plus an agreed-upon percentage of 
the costs as profit. Costs included not only the charges for 
labor and materials, but also certain overhead and deprecia- 
tion charges. This contract form was vicious in principle, and 
the Conference did not approve it. Meanwhile various con- 
tracting officers of the Government had been improving the 
cost-plus contract with provisions which either removed the 
tendency for the contractor to increase his costs or added 
inducements to him to keep his costs down. One of these 
improvements was a cost-plus form providing for a fixed profit 
to the contractor, regardless of what his costs might be. This 
form removed the incentive to increase costs. A still further 
refinement made it of material advantage to a contractor to 
keep down his costs and penalized the man who was careless 
about costs. In this form the Government agreed to pay all 
costs and a fixed profit, but the contract also fixed in advance 
an estimated unit price for the product, this price being known 
as "bogey," a term borrowed from the ancient and honorable 
game of golf. If the contractor succeeded in holding his costs, 
plus his fixed profit, under the unit bogey price, he was paid a 
share of the saving. If, however, his costs and profits ran above 
bogey, then he was penalized a percentage of the excess, the 
penalty being subtracted from his fixed profit when the War 
Department came to pay for the supplies. This form not only 
put a premium upon plant eflficiency, but it stimulated the 
speed of production ; for the briefer the factory processes, the 
smaller the costs, as a rule, and the sooner the contractor would 
get his money. The Interdepartmental Conference approved 
both these forms. 

This was not yet the desideratum of standardization in con- 
tracts, but it was a step in that direction and perhaps as much 

contractors about $250,000,000. On June 1, 1921, it had recouped all but $14,- 
500,000 of these loans. Its total losses were not expected to run over $150,000, 
while the profits (interest, of which $8,000,000 had been collected) were esti- 
mated at $12,000,000. 



WAR CONTRACTS 121 

as could be done in an organization as ill-articulated as that of 
the War Department then was. The Interdepartmental Con- 
ference possessed only advisory powers, but it was able to 
establish a policy for the Government in its contracting func- 
tion. By pointing to the more desirable forms of contracts, its 
report was at least a moral force in securing greater uniform- 
ity in war contracts. It must be remembered, too, that most of 
the contracting officers were men of considerable business 
experience and ability. Many of the leading business men of 
the country were serving the United States either in uniform 
or as officers of such agencies as the Council of National De- 
fense and the War Industries Board, and the procurement 
bureaus had the benefit of their study and advice in the making 
of contracts. 

Under such conditions a great volume of war department 
business was placed in the latter part of 1917 and during the 
early months of 1918. Then the conditions of war industry 
finally forced a reorganization of the War Department, bring- 
ing all of its supply activities (with one or two important 
exceptions) under the single direction of the Division of Pur- 
chase, Storage, and Traffic, of the General Staff. The Division 
of P., S., and T., as it was called, was created early in 1918. 
One of the first acts of its director was to appoint a committee 
to study the various forms of war department contracts in use 
and to recommend standard forms which should keep errors 
at a minimum and make the War Department certain at all 
times as to its rights under its contracts. 

Simultaneously the new Division was assuming a central- 
ized control of war department contracts. Early in June the 
Secretary of War appointed a Surveyor of Contracts, who in 
turn appointed a board of contract review within each pro- 
curement bureau. A bureau board was to pass upon all pro- 
posed contracts drawn by contracting officers, except the few 
contracts which involved the Government for trivial amounts 
of money. This system, with the Surveyor of Contracts dictat- 
ing policies and passing them on down through the bureau 
boards, was effective control of the contracting function under 



122 DEMOBILIZATION 

a single direction; but in late July the Secretary of War still 
further strengthened the scheme by appointing the Superior 
Board of Contract Review. The Director of Purchases and 
Supplies and the Surveyor of Contracts were the general mem- 
bers of this Board, and each procurement bureau sent to it a 
member, who was either the chief procurement officer of the 
bureau or a member of the bureau's board of contract review. 
This Superior Board of Contract Review became the great 
policy-forming agency of the War Department in respect of 
its contracting activities. 

Note, however, that not yet had there been any standardi- 
zation of contracts. In early August the committee appointed 
by the Director of Purchase, Storage, and Traffic to study war 
contracts and recommend standards, made its report. The 
Superior Board of Contract Review received this report, and 
early in September promulgated, on the basis of the report, a 
series of twenty-four standard contract provisions, nineteen of 
them to be included in all war department fixed-price and cost- 
plus contracts, and five particular provisions pertaining either 
to cost-plus or fixed-price contracts, but not to both. Most 
of the standard provisions, except perhaps in their phraseology, 
were not new, but had been used in substance variously by the 
contracting officers. The importance of standardization was 
that it required the use of all of them in the war contracts and 
also dictated the phraseology. One or two of the standard 
clauses, particularly those which anticipated the end of the 
war and the termination of the war industry, were new and 
most important. 

The first six provisions dealt with the Government's obliga- 
tions to furnish raw materials and component parts to the 
manufacturer, with the packing and marking of supplies, with 
the changing of specifications and the Government's assump- 
tion of increased costs or savings wrought thereby, with 
inspection, with the storage of finished products at plants, and 
with extensions of the time of the contract under certain 
conditions. 

The seventh provision anticipated the end of the war by 




Photo by Signal Corps 

SENDING OUT THE STARS AND STRIPES 




Photo by Signal Corps 

GRADUATE A. E. F. STUDENTS AT EDINBURGH 
UNIVERSITY 




Photo by Howard E. Coffin 

REVIEW OF "PERSHING'S OWN REGIMENT " AT COBLENZ 




Photo by Signal Corps 

GAMES IN LE MANS EMBARKATION AREA 



WAR CONTRACTS 123 

providing for the cancellation of contracts under certain cir- 
cumstances, one of which was if the public interest required it. 
This was a new thing in war contracts. The provision set forth 
the reimbursements which the contractor should receive in the 
event of cancellation. 

The eighth forbade contractors receiving advance payments 
from the Government to mortgage or otherwise pledge articles 
partially completed. Thus, if the contract were canceled, the 
Government could take over the unfinished work without 
involving itself in a mesh of legal complications. The next 
provision dealt with protection of war plants. The next was 
the statutory one forbidding the transfer of contracts. 

The eleventh provision dealt with subcontractors, normally 
not of any interest to the Government, but in war of vital 
interest, since the failure of a subcontractor might greatly 
delay an entire project, and since also a cost-plus contract 
offered an opportunity to a prime contractor to conspire with 
a subcontractor to increase costs. The provision gave the Gov- 
ernment full control over the subcontracting and extended to 
the subcontractors the Government's rights of cancellation. 

The twelfth was the statutory one forbidding any member 
of Congress from sharing in the benefits of a contract, except 
that a congressman was permitted to own stock in a corpora- 
tion accepting war contracts. 

The next provision wiped out the horde of fly-by-night com- 
mission brokers who had flocked to Washington to grow rich 
on commissions paid by gullible producers who accepted the 
theory that it took pull and influence to secure a war contract. 
Since these commissions went into the manufacturer's costs 
and therefore were paid eventually by the Government, the 
Attorney General had issued a ruling forbidding the govern- 
ment departments to pay manufacturing costs that included 
brokers' commissions. Established selling agencies, however, 
were exempted from this rule. The thirteenth standard contract 
provision wrote this prohibition into the contracts themselves. 

The next provision dealt with indemnifications for the inva- 
sion of patent rights. The fifteenth provided for the settlement 



124 DEMOBILIZATION 

of disputes and claims arising out of questions of performance 
or nonperformance under contracts. Later the Board of Con- 
tract Adjustment was organized to fulfill this function. The 
next three provisions dealt with hours of labor, the settlement 
of wage disputes, and the conditions of labor at war plants. 
Then came a provision requiring the producer to make periodic 
reports of the progress of his work, one defining what costs 
would be allowed in a cost-plus contract, one allowing the 
contractor to appeal to the Board of Contract Adjustment in 
the event that a contracting officer of the Department dis- 
allowed costs in excess of $5,000, one providing for uniformity 
in contractors' cost accounting, one forbidding the payment of 
wages above current local rates, and a final provision vesting 
in the United States the title to all materials in course of 
manufacture under a cost-plus contract. 

Such were the standard contract provisions, protective and 
fair to the Government and the producers alike. They were 
not adopted until the end of the summer of 1918, and there- 
fore no important amount of government business was placed 
on their identical terms. As stated, however, most of their 
requirements in substance had been written into the war de- 
partment contracts previously drawn. 

The cost-plus contract under which the immense building 
construction program of the War Department was carried 
through was of a peculiar form, not used elsewhere. It was 
known as the cost-plus-with-sliding-scale-and-fixed-maximum- 
fee contract. The distinguishing feature of it was that each 
contractor was paid a percentage of the cost as profit up to the 
extent of a fixed maximum profit, and he could not be paid 
more than this profit whatever the cost of the job. The profit 
percentage diminished on a sliding scale as the cost mounted. 
In its latest form this contract paid a profit of 7 per cent to 
contractors on jobs costing less than $100,000, and the profit 
declined gradually in percentage until it reached the low mark 
oi 2y2 per cent paid as profit for work costing more than 
$9,650,000. No building contractor, however, could be paid 
more than $250,000 profit on a job, whatever its cost; and 



WAR CONTRACTS 125 

out of his "profit" he still had to pay his overhead operating 
expenses. 

In its building program the War Department became one 
of the largest employers of labor in the country, and its build- 
ing contract was roundly attacked as a chief element in the 
swift rise in wages. To meet this attack the Department con- 
vened a board of construction engineers and other experts to 
study the contract. Instead of condemning the form of con- 
tract, the report of this board endorsed it in unqualified terms 
and declared that, if anything, the contract tended to check 
extravagances in the work. 

While the tendency was all toward the cost-plus-fixed-profit 
form of contract, when it came to the production of materials 
entirely new and strange to our industry the War Department 
could not escape the cost-plus-percentage form. The Govern- 
ment's powder-bag-loading plants were operating on the basis 
of the payment of operating costs, plus 14 per cent. Several of 
the shell-loading plants worked under contracts providing for 
the payment of costs, plus 10 per cent. Silk cartridge cloth was 
manufactured at cost, plus 10 per cent as profit. This profit, 
as the skill of the cloth weavers increased, was gradually 
stepped down to 3 per cent. The Modified Enfield rifles were 
made at cost, plus 10 per cent, \Vhen the War Department 
commandeered plants, it engaged operating companies to run 
them on a basis of costs paid, plus a fixed monthly remunera- 
tion. Certain patriotic contractors built large munitions plants 
for the Government at cost, plus the statutory $1 as profit. 

Then there was the combination contract, adopted for work 
new to our industrial experience — a cost-plus form graduating 
into a fixed-profit form as the actual work developed what the 
costs would be. The Browning machine guns were produced 
under contracts of this sort. 

Contracts for the production of aircraft were not brought 
under the centralized administration of war department con- 
tracts. The aircraft contracts provided for the payment of 
costs by the Government, plus fixed profits, with bonuses for 
the producers if they kept under the estimated costs. 



CHAPTER IX 
THE SETTLEMENT OF THE WAR CONTRACTS 

IN the preceding chapter we have been discussing chiefly the 
written, formal contract, the tangible, visible document, 
duly signed and witnessed, which could be submitted to 
any court as prima-facie evidence of the obligations of both 
the producer and the Government. If, however, the impres- 
sion has been given that all the war business was conducted 
under the authority of such instruments, let it now be dis- 
pelled ; because thousands of manufacturers did war work for 
the Government, and the Government itself became involved 
for hundreds of millions of dollars, under another set of ar- 
rangements, which became known, after the armistice, as the 
informal, or "Bevo," contracts. These agreements, while em- 
bodying the same terms as those of the formal contracts, were 
drawn with no such attention to the niceties of federal pro- 
cedure, without which the law says that a government con- 
tract is not enforcible. The informal contracts were a product 
of the hurry and rush to get things done. There were several 
sorts of them, some being formal in type but defective in 
detail, others existing in written records, such as correspond- 
ence, but not in formal contracts, and still others being merely 
oral agreements between the producers and the agents of the 
Government as to what work had to be done. 

The law, in theory, assumes that the Secretary of War him- 
self makes and signs contracts for the production of army 
supplies. He is permitted by law, however, to delegate his 
contracting function to accredited deputies, who are called 
contracting officers. In normal times these contracting officers 
are able to make all the necessary contracts; but during the 
war, with all industry aligning itself in the munitions organi- 



SETTLEMENT OF WAR CONTRACTS 127 

zation, it became physically impossible for the regular con- 
tracting officers to handle all the business, and they in turn 
appointed deputies or proxies, and conferred on them (quite 
illegally, as it afterwards appeared) the right to sign con- 
tracts. Then, in the urgency of the occasion, the procurement 
officers, who were frequently business men commissioned in 
the military service, adopted the common business expedient 
of allowing correspondence to stand as evidence of contractual 
engagements, expecting to follow up this correspondence with 
formal contracts when the ponderous executive machinery of 
the Department could get around to it. Sometimes the pro- 
ducer did not even have the protection of correspondence, but, 
after coming to an oral understanding with the contracting 
officer as to what was to be done and on what terms, hurried 
back to his factory to spend, it might be, hundreds of thou- 
sands of dollars in preparation for some large manufacturing 
effort, without a scrap of writing to secure him in these invest- 
ments. Finally, there was an extensive class of contracts which 
lacked correct form. New officers, unfamiliar with the restric- 
tions which hedge about the governmental administrative acts, 
restrictions which the public calls red tape, took the short cut 
of making out direct purchase orders, which stipulated qual- 
ity, quantity, price, method of payment, time of delivery, and 
so on ; and the producers accepted such orders in good faith as 
binding agreements. 

All went well with this informal procedure until the armi- 
stice brought the necessity of terminating the war business. 
The question was. How might the oral and other informal 
contracts be settled^ And then the Comptroller of the Treas- 
ury rendered the absolutely stunning decision that all these 
informal arrangements, including the formal contracts which 
had been signed by proxies of the constituted contracting offi- 
cers, were illegal and without standing before the Treasury, 
and that not a penny of government money could be paid out 
in settlement of the obligations of the Government under the 
terms of these agreements, except that the Government could 
pay for goods actually delivered. At that time the outstanding 



128 DEMOBILIZATION 

contracts and agreements of all sorts involved the Government 
in the sum of approximately $7,500,000,000. The informal 
contracts, thus declared void, accounted for $1,500,000,000 
of this sum. The Government, if it chose, could refuse to reim- 
burse a dollar of hundreds of millions expended freely by 
patriotic manufacturers, careless of their own interests in their 
eagerness to give their utmost service to the prosecution of the 
war. 

Of course, repudiation of these agreements was unthinkable, 
if only for the reason that such action would have brought on 
an unprecedented business panic and sent many concerns crash- 
ing down into bankruptcy. Yet the only remedy was legislation 
to permit the Government to settle up its obligations under 
these contracts just as if they had been properly drawn in the 
first place. Such legislation, known as the Dent Act, was even- 
tually passed by Congress, the law being approved by the 
President on March 2, 1919. In the interim between the armi- 
stice and that date, the holders of informal and irregular con- 
tracts were subjected to an unavoidable injustice, the nature 
of which will be plain when we have somewhat examined the 
War Department's method of terminating its war industry. 

The modern contract is the foundation stone of industry and 
commerce. If the integrity of that foundation be impaired, we 
come into a condition of anarchy of which Anglo-Saxon civili- 
zation knows nothing. The man who breaches a contract can 
be held in court to indemnify the other party to it, and the 
Government itself cannot escape such liability. On the first 
day of the armistice there were 30,000 outstanding war de- 
partment contracts. Three thousand of these, involving a 
government expenditure of over $1,500,000,000, either were 
so near completion or called for the production of materials 
so necessary to the maintenance of the demobilizing Army or 
for the future preparedness of the United States that they were 
allowed to go through undisturbed. The other 27,000 con- 
tracts bore a face value of $6,000,000,000. Under many of 
them there had been extensive deliveries of finished supplies 
to the Government, these deliveries (including the deliveries 



SETTLEMENT OF WAR CONTRACTS 129 

made while the industries were tapering off their production 
and adjusting themselves to peace conditions) amounting to 
approximately $2,000,000,000 in value. Thus there was left 
to the War Department a contractual obligation amounting to 
$4,000,000,000, which huge sum would go to pay for a great 
mass of materials for which the Government could have no 
possible use. It was highly desirable to terminate the unful- 
filled portions of these contracts ; yet few of the contracts con- 
tained termination clauses. It will be remembered that the 
standard termination clause did not appear as a common fea- 
ture of the war contracts until the final six weeks of hostilities. 
Thus the majority of the 27,000 contractors possessed the 
plain legal right to go through with the performance of their 
contracts, even though the war had ended, and thereafter to 
hold the Government to the full payment of the face value of 
the contracts. The sum of such determination, had it been 
unanimous, would have cost the United States $4,000,000,- 
000 with nothing to show for it except a great collection of 
useless munitions which could be sold to the junk dealers. 

Upon the administration of the War Department rested the 
responsibility to save for the people as much of this sum as 
could be saved. Not all of it could be saved. Millions had 
been spent by the contractors for machinery and other equip- 
ment, for materials, and to pay manufacturing costs during the 
early stages of production. These millions the Government was 
bound to reimburse in any event, together with a reasonable 
profit upon work already done. The closer the administration 
could come to paying these legitimate costs and nothing else, 
the more successful would be its conduct of the industrial 
demobilization. The question was, what procedure to adopt. 

To be sure, the departmental heads might have adopted the 
policy of canceling the contracts outright; but such a course 
would have meant ruin for many manufacturers, it would have 
thrown into the courts a mass of litigation that would have 
congested them for the next two generations, and it would 
have shattered the faith of business in the Government and 
rendered difficult all governmental contracting in the future. 



130 DEMOBILIZATION 

Instead of that, the war department heads adopted the shrewd 
measure of requesting the producers to suspend work on their 
contracts. They made termination a voluntary act on the part 
of the contractor. It is obvious that it wa^ fully as much to the 
interest of the producers as to that of the Government to 
liquidate the war business amicably and, it may be said, inex- 
pensively, since these very men would be the ones called upon 
to contribute most heavily in taxes to the payment of the war 
debt. Nevertheless, it was greatly to the credit of American 
business men that their response to the general request to ter- 
minate war contracts was nearly unanimous. There was scarcely 
one who stood on his full legal rights. The business of indus- 
trial demobilization was largely that of negotiating with the 
individual producers as to the terms under which they would 
consent to terminate their contracts. When the terms were 
adopted, they were written into the original contracts as sup- 
plemental agreements and thus given legal force. The decision 
which resulted in this procedure was one of the great adminis- 
trative acts of the War Government. It saved billions of dol- 
lars to the Government and it sent the war producers away 
fairly well content with the treatment they had received. 

The preliminary steps in industrial demobilization were 
taken before the armistice. For one thing, in those final days 
when it was apparent that the end was close at hand, the War 
Department adopted the policy of terminating the war con- 
tracts by agreement. For that purpose, the war department 
administration added to the standard contract provisions al- 
ready adopted standard forms of supplemental agreements, to 
the end that the liquidation of war industry might be carried 
out uniformly. On November 9 all production bureaus of the 
Department were notified to be ready to enforce the termina- 
tion clauses of contracts when the fighting ended. This order, 
of course, applied only to those contracts containing termina- 
tion clauses; but at the same time provision was made for the 
suspension of war work when the public interest required it. 
This suspension was to be preliminary to the adoption of ar- 
rangements whereby war industry could be gradually stopped 



SETTLEMENT OF WAR CONTRACTS 131 

down and readjusted by easy stages. On this date, too, the 
Department adopted a policy from which it never afterwards 
deviated: not to pay to a producer any profits on prospective 
production under his contract, but to allow a profit as high as 
10 per cent of the cost on work that had actually been done 
but from which no actual production might have resulted. 
Thus from the very first the Government showed a spirit of 
conciliation that promised well for the producers of war 
supplies. 

On the morning of November 11, after the receipt of the 
official news of the armistice, the Secretary of War, the Secre- 
tary of the Navy, and the Director of the United States 
Shipping Board announced after a conference that all Sunday 
work and overtime work on government contracts would cease 
at once, and that war industry would be tapered off by the 
various procurement agencies in consultation with the Depart- 
ment of Labor and the War Industries Board. These two or- 
ganizations, the one in contact with employers and the other 
with labor, were in a position to guard the interests both of 
labor and of industry. Meanwhile the procurement bureaus 
of the War Department, following the recent instructions, 
had sent out generally requests to suspend the manufacture of 
munitions. These orders were soon modified to allow produc- 
tion to continue at most of the war plants, but the brief 
interim of idleness gave the procurement officers time to survey 
the situation and also served as a notice to the manufacturers 
that the war was over and that they were to incur no further 
obligations in pursuance of their contracts. 

Simultaneously with issuing the suspension requests, the 
procurement bureaus in Washington began making out what 
were known as termination schedules. These were detailed 
statements of proposed reductions in war work compiled by 
individual contracts, by manufacturing projects, by entire 
commodities that were being consumed by the Army, and by 
entire production programs. These schedules were first sent for 
approval to the Director of Purchase, Storage, and Traffic, 
who also secured the approval of the War Industries Board 



132 DEMOBILIZATION 

and the Department of Labor. The approved schedules were 
then sent back to the bureaus for action, except that the 
bureaus were instructed to terminate the production gradually 
so as not to disturb industry in any particular localities. The 
terminations, of course, were made by agreement with the pro- 
ducers, the agreements embodying the terms under which the 
manufacturing ceased. 

So expeditiously was this work started that the first termi- 
nation schedules reached the Director of Purchase, Storage, 
and Traffic on November 12, and the schedules poured in upon 
him every day thereafter. Within a few days the prepared 
schedules involved the termination of a billion dollars' worth 
of work. Each schedule was the product of a comprehensive 
study of the industries affected, made by the production 
bureaus, which were in intimate touch with those industries. 
On December 5 the terminations and reductions reached a 
total of $2,500,000,000. A large part of the war industry had 
been reduced or terminated without serious detriment to the 
condition of business and employment. Consequently, it was 
decided that no such precautions as were being taken were 
longer necessary, and a change in the liquidation system went 
into effect. Thereafter the stoppage of war industry was placed 
entirely in the hands of the district production officers of the 
War Department. These men were to consult with the local 
officers of the Department of Labor as to the effect of termi- 
nations upon employment, and were also to make frequent 
regular reports to the Director of Purchase, Storage, and 
Traffic. For the rest, they were free to act according to their 
own best judgment. 

The various supply bureaus were well organized to con- 
duct the demobilization in this way. Before 1917 the bureaus 
had administered the production of supplies directly from 
their headquarters in Washington. After the war came, the 
volume of business grew beyond the capacity of such a system 
to handle it efficiently; and the principal production bureaus 
thereupon divided the country into manufacturing districts 
and placed district organizations, subsidiary to the bureau 



SETTLEMENT OF WAR CONTRACTS 133 

headquarters in Washington, in charge of them. The bureaus 
in Washington continued to execute contracts, but the work 
of superintending manufacture, inspecting products, and pay- 
ing for supplies was placed in the hands of the district organi- 
zations. The Ordnance Department, for instance, established 
twelve manufacturing districts in the United States and one 
in Canada. The Director of Purchase, in charge of the produc- 
tion of quartermaster supplies, established fourteen such dis- 
tricts, which were called zones. The Air Service had eight dis- 
tricts and the Chemical Warfare Service four. All production 
for the Signal Corps, Engineers, Construction Division, and 
Medical Department was administered directly from Wash- 
ington. 

This decentralization of the field administration of war 
industry had a marked effect upon its efficiency. The adminis- 
trative officers in charge of a manufacturing district were men 
of high standing in the business and industry of their respec- 
tive regions. They knew the manufacturers in those regions. 
They were always right at the spot when difficulties arose in 
securing raw materials and fuel and shipping priorities. Even 
more important, each district organization had within it a 
representative of the Finance Service of the Army. The War 
Department was empowered to make advance payments on 
contracts up to a considerable percentage of the value of work 
done or supplies actually delivered. These advances, as we 
have said before, enabled the munitions producers to finance 
their projects. The district organizations, maintaining finance 
officers in the field as they did, enabled the producers to obtain 
these advances in a minimum of time. 

Frequently the chief executive officers of the manufacturing 
districts were civilians. Each district board maintained a 
strong legal department and also numerous technical assistants, 
not the least among which were the cost accountants. Since a 
great portion of the war supplies were produced on the cost- 
plus plan, the war brought the cost accountant into great 
prominence, during both the period of production and the 
period of liquidation afterwards. 



134 DEMOBILIZATION 

These district organizations, in immediate contact as they 
were with the producers, comprised an organization ready- 
built for the delicate work of terminating war industry. Wash- 
ington might fix policies and specify the classes of supplies the 
production of which was to be stopped and the sorts which 
were to be produced after the armistice in full or curtailed 
quantities. It was for the district administrations to say how 
the terminations and reductions should be carried out. Conse- 
quently, after the armistice the organizations in charge of the 
manufacturing districts were changed over into what were 
variously known as district claims boards and district boards 
of review. Whatever they were called by the bureaus creating 
them, their duties were essentially the same — to terminate con- 
tracts by mutual consent, to agree with the producers upon the 
terms of settlement, to take over in the name of the War De- 
partment such finished products, raw and semi-finished mate- 
rials, machinery, buildings, and other equipment as became 
government property under the terms of the settlements, and 
to dispose of the materials thus taken over, some being 
selected for permanent retention among the nation's war assets, 
some being turned over to other branches of the Government 
which could make use of them, and others being disposed of 
by sale. To assist it in this work, each district board maintained 
a subsidiary organization known as the district salvage board, 
which collected the government property and disposed of it. 

To supervise this field activity, each procurement bureau of 
the War Department established at headquarters in Washing- 
ton a superior board known as the bureau claims board. Each 
of these supervisory boards, in turn, created as an adjunct to 
itself a bureau salvage board, which maintained executive con- 
trol over the district salvage boards. For several weeks there 
was no specific executive agency to direct the work of this 
organization, except that all the bureau and district boards 
were under the general authority of the Director of Purchase, 
Storage, and Traffic. He unified and controlled their work 
through what were known as supply circulars, a medium of 
administration which had come into great importance after 



SETTLEMENT OF WAR CONTRACTS 135 

— the creation of the Division of Purchase, Storage, and Traffic. 
Through the supply circulars the administration of war indus- 
try issued its general and class directions to the production 
bureaus. The standard contract provisions, for instance, had 
been brought to the attention of the contracting officers by 
publication in the supply circulars. The series of supply circu- 
lars thus came to be the code of unified army supply. 

The Director of Purchase, Storage, and Traffic, however, 
had many duties other than those of directing the demobiliza- 
ytion, though none more important. It was realized that the\ 
/ system needed a controlling head, the sole function of which \ 
\ would be to administer the entire liquidation of war industry, j 
Therefore, late in January, 1919, the Secretary of War 
created the War Department Claims Board, into which were 
to focus, through the bureau boards, all the field activities in 
industrial demobilization. The Assistant Secretary of War 
became the president of this board. Mr. G. H. Dorr, who was 
also the assistant Director of Munitions, and Brigadier Gen- 
eral (later Major General) George W. Burr, who had suc- 
ceeded General G. W. Goethals as Director of Purchase, 
Storage, and Traffic, were the first regular members of the 
War Department Claims Board. There were also three special 
members and a recorder, and as time went on the Board was 
expanded by the creation of subcommittees of experts in 
various legal and industrial subjects. 

The process of liquidation, therefore, originated with the 
district boards. In settling with a contractor, the district board 
appraised all the articles completed under the contract. It 
examined the expenditures which the contractor had made and 
the obligations he had incurred looking toward the finished 
production. Under the demobilization policy adopted, the 
Government was responsible for both of these costs. It paid for 
completed supplies (the price including the contractor's 
profit), for raw materials purchased for the contract but not 
used, for semi-finished materials, for the contractor's obliga- 
tions to his subcontractors (including the costs of canceling 
the subcontracts), and, finally, for all general operating costs, 



136 DEMOBILIZATION 

including the contractor's "overhead" expenses, factory and 
machine depreciation costs, and the amortization of new facili- 
ties built at the Government's behest. To the most important 
production costs (but not including depreciation or amortiza- 
tion costs or interest on money invested in materials) the 
claims boards were authorized to add 10 per cent of the sum 
as the contractor's profit. The Government paid no prospective 
profits, but only a fair remuneration for work actually done. 

This was the proposition extended to the manufacturer 
when the Government proposed to him the voluntary termina- 
tion of his contract. Most of the contractors received the terms 
favorably: they did not wish to collect money for work not 
done, even though theirs was the technically legal right to do 
so. If any producer balked at the policy, he always had the 
remedy of seeking his full pound of flesh in the Court of 
Claims. However, the slowness of procedure in the Court 
of Claims made this a weak remedy; and even if the Court of 
Claims finally granted him his exactions, then he must wait 
for his money until Congress passed an act appropriating it 
from the Treasury. Only recently Congress passed a bill to 
reimburse the estate of a long-deceased individual who was 
wrongfully deprived of a horse during the Civil War. Such 
was the prospect which faced the contractor unwilling to 
accept the War Department's terms of settlement. With this 
coercive potentiality in the Government's position, the Gov- 
ernment itself fixed the terms of settlement, at least in broad 
outline ; but the terms were, in the main, fair to all concerned. 

The district boards proved to be able to liquidate most of 
the contracts without dispute. From these boards the settle- 
ment agreements went up for approval first to the bureau 
claims boards and finally to the War Department Claims 
Board, with certain exceptions to be noted later. If agreements 
could not be reached by the district boards, appeals could be 
taken to the bureau boards and, after them, to the War De- 
partment Claims Board. The last-named body designated one 
of its members to sit with each bureau board and to exercise 
the authority of the War Department Claims Board in approv- 



SETTLEMENT OF WAR CONTRACTS 137 

ing all settlements after action by the bureau board. The 
approval of the special member, acting in the name of the 
Secretary of War, constituted the final step in the settlement, 
which then passed to the finance officers for payment. Thus 
only a few of the 27,000 suspended contracts reached the War 
Department Claims Board for detailed consideration. Nearly 
all of them came up to the highest authority as agreed-upon 
settlements, needing only the approval of the proper special 
member of the War Department Claims Board before being 
embodied within the original contracts as supplementary agree- 
ments. Occasionally questions of fact arose as to the fidelity of 
a contractor's performance under the terms of his contract. 
Such questions were carried by appeal, not to the War Depart- 
ment Claims Board, but to the Department's Board of Con- 
tract Adjustment, which, it will be remembered, was, by infer- 
ence, set up as arbiter of such questions by one of the standard 
contract provisions. The Board of Contract Adjustment had 
other and more important duties in connection with the indus- 
trial liquidation, as will be shown later. 

Now this settlement system was able to render an impor- 
tant service to American industry during the demobilization. 
Many of the contractors had gone to the limit of their re- 
sources in procuring buildings, machinery, materials, and work 
in the prosecution of their contracts. As long as production 
was continuing, the Government could finance the expansion 
by making advance payments to the cost-plus contractors and 
by advancing money to others through the War Credits 
Board. But when the contracts were terminated, the Govern- 
ment could no longer follow this financing system, and the con- 
tractors faced a period of months or even years before they 
could conclude their settlements with the Government. Dur- 
ing all that time their invested money would be tied up. Some 
of the 1 ii deeply involved — and large concerns they were, 
too — w( r/ |.::rilously near actual bankruptcy as a result. 

For the relief of such producers the War Department con- 
tinued in demobilization its plan of advance payments, with, 
of course, a difference. Before the armistice the Government, 



138 DEMOBILIZATION 

in making advance payments, paid a percentage of the cost of 
work actually done. After the armistice no work to speak of 
was being done; yet in practically all the settlements there 
were numerous items of cost admittedly legitimate and about 
which there was no dispute. These were such items as materials 
in sight, appraised, and invoiced to the War Department, and 
such items as the contractor's obligations to his subcontractors. 
The War Department adopted the policy of making payments 
in advance of final settlement up to 75 per cent of its admitted 
obligations. These payments, amounting in all to more than 
$143,000,000, enabled the producers to tide over the period 
between the termination of work and the final settlement with 
the Government. The practice of maintaining officers of the 
Finance Service as members of the district claims boards facili- 
tated the prompt payment of these advances. In the final set- 
tlements, of course, the Government subtracted from the 
amounts due from it to the producers all advances made to 
them. 

From this outline it will be seen that the War Department, 
in striking a balance with war industry, set up within itself 
what was essentially a system of courts, with a regular pro- 
cedure and process of appeal and — for such the decisions of 
the War Department Claims Board came to be — a body of 
laws and precedents. The court system, however, had the ad- 
vantage of flexibility, simplicity, and rapidity of action, being 
hampered by none of the rules and customs that circumscribe 
the regular courts. The war department courts, if we may call 
the claims boards that, were courts of conciliatic ■ le claim- 
ants partook of their benefits voluntarily. They ?::i;;iit, under 
certain conditions, at any time appeal to the resrui-'r federal 
courts; but there they faced years of litigation bt^lore they 
could reach final settlement. This gave the war department 
system a great advantage, which the Departmeii' 'ilized to 
obtain advantageous terms for itself; yet it musr .. said that 
the entire liquidation was conducted in a spirit of df si -e to make 
the contractors whole for all their expenditures. 

We are now in a position to understand th; 'avoidable 



SETTLEMENT OF WAR CONTRACTS 139 

injury done to the holders of the informal contracts during 
the first months after the armistice. When the Comptroller of 
the Treasury ruled that the informal contracts were invalid, 
he foreclosed the War Department from making any advance 
settlement payments to these victims of patriotism and haste. 
Many of them were as heavily obligated financially as the 
holders of the valid contracts, and their solvency was equally 
precarious. Yet not a dollar of government money could they 
receive until the wheels of legislation had ground out author- 
ity for the settlement of their claims. Some of their circum- 
stances were particularly distressing. 

Early in October, 1918, one of the war department bureaus 
ordered a certain manufacturer to produce 5,000 frames for 
army trucks on the security that "formal contract will follow." 
He was awaiting the arrival of this document to justify him in 
making commitments for materials when he received an urgent 
message from Washington beseeching him to make early de- 
livery of the frames. He yielded, and without waiting for 
the formal contract spent over $500,000 for machinery and 
materials. The armistice was signed before his formal contract 
was executed, and then, with his production stopped, he was 
unable to collect a penny of the money due him. Another man 
spent $400,000 in the prosecution of a contract, only to find 
after the armistice that his apparently valid contract had been 
improperly signed and therefore was classed among the 
invalid contracts. 

The Dent Law gave all such claims a legal footing, but that 
act was not in force until March 2, 1919. Meanwhile, how- 
ever, the War Department's liquidation machinery had taken 
up the settlement of t'v i formal contracts along with the 
others. The district boc.^/'r 'id determined for many of them 
what part of the work hz/i ^en completed, what amounts the 
Government should pa materials delivered, what reim- 

bursements the produce • ' aid receive for expenditures made 
in preparation for prod, on, and in many instances had 
reached complete agreeinc ics as to final lump-sum settlements. 
When the Dent Law '■ r: m the statute books, these agree- 



140 DEMOBILIZATION 

ments needed only final approval to become operative; and 
therefore the settlement of the informal claims proceeded with 
great rapidity after the passage of the enabling act. 

The Dent Law conferred upon the Secretary of War power 
to adjust the informal contracts on equitable terms, with the 
proviso (already adopted as policy in the settlement of the 
valid contracts) that no prospective profits should be paid. 
This power the Secretary delegated to the War Department 
Claims Board, with two exceptions. Invalid contracts made 
with Canadian producers were to be adjusted by the Imperial 
Munitions Board, a branch of the British Ministry of Muni- 
tions, which had acted as the agent of the War Department 
in procuring army supplies in Canada. All contracts with other 
foreign producers — they were principally French and British 
producers — were to be settled by various foreign agencies and 
representatives of the War Department. 

The informal contracts with American producers were of 
two sorts — those of which there was written evidence and 
those of which there was no written evidence. The former were 
known as Class A contracts and the latter as Class B. The 
Class A contracts were contracts apparently formal but im- 
properly executed, or procurement orders, or correspondence 
setting forth the contract terms. The Class B contracts were 
agreements wholly or in part oral. The Class A contracts pre- 
sented no difficulty to the War Department Claims Board, 
and they were put through to settlement by the regular pro- 
cedure. It required the taking of testimony to establish the 
terms of Class B contracts, and the War Department Claims 
Board, with its subsidiary boards, had its hands too full with 
the regular routine of liquidatio add to its business this 

new, voluminous work; and then - . it in turn delegated the 
duty of establishing the terms of no Class B contracts to the 
Board of Contract Adjustment, -c creation of which was 
noted above. 

The Board of Contract Adjuj v t heard witnesses and 
then rendered a decision as to the enns of a Class B contract. 
After that it did one of two thing • ■" ^ef erred the now estab- 



SETTLEMENT OF WAR CONTRACTS 141 

lished contract to the proper district board for settlement, or 
else it determined itself the financial obligation of the Govern- 
ment and issued an award to the producer. In addition to this 
work the War Department Board of Contract Adjustment, as 
a convenient agency, also settled contracts of all sorts made 
by such presidential agencies as the War Industries Board and 
the United States Food Administration. 

After the Dent Act was in operation, the War Department 
extended to the informal contractors also the privilege of re- 
ceiving partial payments in advance of final settlement. 

Such, in outline, was the system which liquidated the war 
industry and struck the balance between the War Department 
and the munitions producers. A few details of organization 
should be noted. The War Department Claims Board greatly 
expanded its own organization during the episode by creating 
various subsidiary bodies. One of these was its Standing Com- 
mittee (composed of members of the Board), which did most 
of the actual work for the Board and presented its acts for the 
consideration of the entire Board in the form of resolutions. 
These resolutions in time became a body of precedents to 
standardize the whole procedure. To handle engineering and 
other technical questions, the War Department Claims Board 
created its Technical Section, which, in turn, established 
within itself its Plant Valuation Group, made up of men spe- 
cially qualified to appraise the contemporary value of plants 
erected for the War Department by producers with the under- 
standing that the Department would pay for these plants, or 
an agreed-upon portion of their cost. The Special Auditing 
Committee of the Board also conducted a work of great im- 
portance. During the war numerous manufacturers held con- 
tracts with two or more production bureaus of the War De- 
partment. After the armistice they filed separate claims for 
the settlement of such contracts. There was always danger that 
in these claims there would be duplicate items of such costs as 
overhead expense and plant deterioration. The Auditing Com- 
mittee consolidated the claims of individual producers and 
thus enabled the War Department Claims Board to strike out 



142 DEMOBILIZATION 

duplicate items of cost. Numerous contractors followed the 
old peace-time procedure of filing claims with the auditor of 
the War Department. So many claims originated from this 
source that the War Department Claims Board established 
in the office of the Director of Finance a Classification Board 
to separate all claims coming to the auditor and to refer them 
to the proper bureau boards. 

This system had nothing to do with the settlement of claims 
arising out of the War Department's operations in real estate 
during the war. There were thousands of claims for damage 
done to property incidental to the training of the Army. To 
settle such claims the Secretary of War utilized the existing 
War Department Board of Appraisers, which had been created 
to establish the values of commandeered property. The com- 
manders of military posts investigated the validity of real 
estate claims and recommended awards. These, after approval 
by the Board of Appraisers and the Secretary of War, were 
paid by the auditor of the War Department. Numerous real 
estate claims arose under informal and invalid agreements, 
and the condition of such claimants was usually particularly 
helpless. When the War Department started to build its great 
trinitrotoluol plant at Racine, Wisconsin, a large number of 
persons, home owners and renters, moved off the site without 
the formality of written contracts. Many of these individuals 
sold their farm animals and household goods. The armistice 
cut short the construction of the plant, and then the property 
owners discovered that they were without legal standing be- 
fore the Government. The Dent Law enabled the Department 
to settle these and other real estate claims arising under infor- 
mal contracts, and the Board of Appraisers made the settle- 
ments. 

The Canadian contracts, both formal and informal, were 
adjusted by the Imperial Munitions Board, acting in conjunc- 
tion with two American officers called assessors, one of whom 
was a special member of the War Department Claims Board. 
Mr. D. C. Jackling, the director of United States Government 
Explosives Plants, adjusted all the outstanding contracts and 



SETTLEMENT OF WAR CONTRACTS 143 

orders in connection with the construction of the Nitro (West 
Virginia) Powder Plant. More than 3,200 firms and individ- 
uals had received orders for materials for the plant, and a fire 
at the plant immediately after the armistice destroyed the 
records of all open orders. The terms of these orders were 
reestablished by correspondence with the contractors. A special 
settlement board within the Ordnance Department adjusted 
the terminated contracts for the construction of nitrogen fixa- 
tion plants authorized as a war measure. The Spruce Produc- 
tion Corporation of the Air Service terminated and settled its 
own contracts with the spruce lumber interests in the North- 
west. 

On July 1, 1920, the War Department Claims Board, which 
had conducted the liquidation of the Department's war busi- 
ness (with the small exceptions noted above) ended its work 
and disbanded, turning over to the regular military organiza- 
tion of the War Department the residue and remnant of work 
still left. Of the 27,000 war contracts, 26,000 had been termi- 
nated and settled by the Department. There were still 995 
claims pending, or less than 4 per cent of the original number; 
but more than half the auditing and other preliminary work 
on these 995 claims was done. The liquidation was therefore 
more than 98 per cent complete, and this in little more than a 
year and a half after the Government halted the mightiest 
industrial undertaking upon which any people ever embarked. 
The promptness and wisdom shown in that settlement had 
allowed war industry to taper off and stop without shock to the 
economic structure of the country, had stabilized business, 
relieved the banks of the country of a vast load of debt which 
they were carrying for the war producers, and thus had 
brought the nation safely and easily through what might 
otherwise have been the sharpest business crisis it had ever 
known. Concretely, in dollars and cents, this work was of 
great material benefit to the Government and people of the 
United States. The rate of liquidation of the unfinished por- 
tions of the war contracts averaged fourteen cents to the 
dollar — that is, the payment of fourteen cents by the Govern- 



144 DEMOBILIZATION 

ment satisfied and wiped out a contractual obligation of one 
dollar. At this ratio, the settlements effected by the War 
Department Claims Board saved the people of this country 
from having to pay out well over $3,300,000,000. 



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CHAPTER X 
ORDNANCE DEMOBILIZATION 

WHEN the average man speaks of munitions, he 
means ordnance and, even more specifically, guns 
and ammunition. In this he is nearly half right. 
Technically, the word "munitions" includes army supplies of 
all sorts, even to candy and cigarettes, and in this sense the 
word is used in these volumes; but of the total war business 
transacted for the Army, the procurement of ordnance sup- 
plies constituted 42 per cent. Ordnance was by far the largest 
class of munitions. Four thousand American manufacturing 
plants worked on ordnance contracts during the war. Nearly 
3,000,000 men labored in these mills. 

The mere size of the war ordnance industry would have 
made the problem of its demobilization a great one, but it was 
also complicated with peculiar difficulties. The production of 
most ordnance materials differed radically from that of any 
articles known in normal American industry. The Quarter- 
master Department procured for the Army food, clothing, 
shoes, hand tools, and many other supplies which, though they 
were frequently of special design, nevertheless were not much 
unlike the sorts of commodities with which the contractors 
were already familiar. The Engineer Corps used many mate- 
rials commonly employed in the peaceful pursuits. Outside 
of ordnance, the manufacture of aircraft alone took our 
industries into virgin fields of endeavor. 

Therefore, those factories which were making for the Army 
products essentially similar to products consumed by the 
civilian population, were ready after the armistice to resume 
their places in normal commerce with slight internal adjust- 



146 DEMOBILIZATION 

ment. But the ordnance factories — they were a different story. 
In ordnance production the war had witnessed some factory 
conversions of the most violent sort. Manufacturers of print- 
ing presses built gun carriages of new and difficult design; 
makers of sewing machines and automobiles undertook the 
difficult task of producing hydropneumatic recuperators for 
absorbing the recoil of field guns; producers of typewriters 
and water meters manufactured time fuses for shell; women's 
cloak factories sewed silk powder bags; a phonograph maker 
produced aerial bomb sights; and one producer turned from 
the modern business of making corsets and took up the ancient 
occupation of tentmaker. For nearly all these factories the 
ordnance contracts virtually implied the physical reequipment 
of their plants for quite different manufacturing processes. For 
them, too, demobilization meant a not less severe dislocation 
of equipment and processes in changing back again to their 
former work. 

It was the problem of the Ordnance Department after the 
armistice to manage the liquidation of its great war business — 
to halt the work, to dispose of raw materials and materials left 
half completed when the wheels stopped, to do something with 
the special factories and even the complete towns built by the 
Government or for the Government in the prosecution of the 
war enterprise, to recoup the millions advanced to finance the 
ordnance producers, and finally to settle with cash the obliga- 
tions of the Government to the producers incurred when the 
contracts were terminated. 

Although in size and intricacy this problem was appalling, 
there was no hesitation in setting about solving it, no period 
when the enterprise hung in neutral, going neither forward 
nor backward. Ordnance work was reaching new peaks of pro- 
duction when the Ordnance Department in Washington took 
the first steps toward its dismemberment. In late October, 
1918, when the Argonne-Meuse offensive was striking home 
and it was becoming evident that the curtain might at any 
time fall in the theatre of war, the chief ordnance officers held 
a secret meeting one Sunday afternoon in Washington and 



ORDNANCE DEMOBILIZATION 147 

for the first time considered the possible demobilization. At 
this meeting the Chief of Ordnance appointed a commission 
to make a rapid study of the organization of the Ordnance 
Department to determine whether that organization was fitted 
to turn without change to the stoppage of work and the res- 
toration of the industry to its former basis. This same com- 
mission later became the Ordnance Claims Board, the agency 
which supervised the entire demobilization of ordnance indus- 
try. It was, of course, like all the other bureau claims boards, 
subsidiary to the War Department Claims Board. The Ord- 
nance Claims Board was formally created by order on Novem- 
ber 2, and thus had been in existence for nine days when the 
armistice was signed. Its chief was Brigadier General W. S. 
Peirce. Its members were Colonel R. P. Lamont, who was 
president of the American Steel Foundries Corporation before 
and after his military service in the World War; Colonel 
G. H. Stewart, an ordnance officer of the Regular Army; 
Lieutenant Colonel M. F. Briggs, counselor at law. New 
York; Lieutenant Colonel F. R. Ayer, recorder of the Eastern 
Manufacturing Company, of Bangor, Maine ; and Mr. Waldo 
H. Marshall, president of the American Locomotive Company, 
New York. 

This board found an existing organization — the field admin- 
istrations of the thirteen ordnance manufacturing districts — 
admirably adapted to the work of closing up the war business. 
The district organizations had been created to give the Ord- 
nance Department a mechanism by which it could keep in 
immediate contact with the process of manufacture without 
congesting the headquarters in Washington to the point where 
competent management became impossible. They had been 
likened roughly to the fire exits of a theatre, distributed to 
prevent crowding at the front doors. In the district organiza- 
tions were employed 33,000 civilians, uniformed officers, and 
enlisted men, and through this great force the office in Wash- 
ington kept in as intimate touch with the work, the trials, and 
the accomplishments of its producers as if it had been employ- 
ing the services of but a single factory. The ordnance field 



148 DEMOBILIZATION 

men knew the war factories as they knew their own offices. 
They were acquainted with the contractors, with the subcon- 
tractors, with the shop superintendents and foremen, and 
often with the workmen themselves. Obviously they were 
qualified to judge at what rate production could be stopped 
without injury to the industry or its workmen and to deter- 
mine the settlement adjustments that would be fair to both 
sides. 

It is worth while pausing a moment to examine the thirteen 
ordnance districts and to note their headquarters cities, their 
extent, the characteristic sorts of ordnance supplies produced 
in each, and the chief production officer of each. 

Toronto. Embraced the whole of Canada. Produced prin- 
cipally shell machined and ready for loading, particularly 
75-millimeter shell. As noted in the preceding chapter, all 
industrial demobilization in Canada was carried out by the 
Imperial Munitions Board, two of the members of which 
were special representatives of the War Department Claims 
Board, sent to Canada after the armistice for this purpose. 

Bridgeport. Included Connecticut and four Massachusetts 
counties. Primarily the small-arms district, producing all the 
pistols and revolvers, all the bayonets, all the automatic rifles, 
more than a million of the service rifles, most of the heavy 
machine guns, and almost all the small-arms ammunition 
delivered under war contracts. Mr. Waldo C. Bryant of 
Bridgeport was chief of the district. 

Boston. Included the rest of New England. The chief pro- 
ducer of soldiers' belts, haversacks, mess kits, and other per- 
sonal ordnance equipment; produced small-arms ammunition 
heavily, and produced also boosters and adapters (for shell) 
and carriages for 155-millimeter howitzers. Mr. Levi H. 
Greenwood, chief of district. 

New York. Included New York City, Long Island, and 
nine other New York and twelve New Jersey counties. The 
prime producer of trench-warfare ordnance. Produced much 
toluol and was a finisher of shell, fuses, and cartridge cases. 
Loaded more than one-third of all artillery ammunition 



ORDNANCE DEMOBILIZATION 149 

shipped abroad. Chief, Mr. George J. Roberts, vice-president 
of the Public Service Corporation of New Jersey. 

Philadelphia. Included eastern Pennsylvania, part of New 
Jersey, and all of Delaware. The chief service-rifle producer 
and a chief producer of high explosives. Immense shell-load- 
ing activities. Chief, Mr. John C. Jones, president of the 
Harrison Safety Boiler Works. 

Baltimore. Included all of Maryland but two western coun- 
ties, and all of the District of Columbia and the states of 
Virginia and North and South Carolina. The leading shrapnel- 
loading district and a great shell-loading area. Contained the 
largest of the ammonium nitrate plants. Produced all the 
37-millimeter guns. Chief, Lieutenant Colonel A. V. Barnes, 
formerly president of the American Book Company. 

Rochester. Embraced all the state of New York not in the 
New York City district. Chief production was in Lewis 
machine guns, Enfield rifles, 75-millimeter field guns, shrap- 
nel, picric acid, and optical glass. Chief, Mr. Frank S. Noble, 
executive officer of the Eastman Kodak Company. 

Cleveland. Northern Ohio and three northwestern counties 
of Pennsylvania. Produced completed big guns, shell fuses, 
75-millimeter gun carriages, mounts for railway artillery, and 
6-ton tanks. Chief, Mr. Samuel Scovil, former president of 
the Cleveland Electric Illuminating Company. 

Detroit. Included the state of Michigan. Produced gun re- 
coil recuperators, artillery vehicles, large-caliber shell, and 
trench-mortar shell. Chief, Mr. Fred J. Robinson, president 
of the Lowery-Robinson Lumber Company. 

Chicago. Included northern Illinois and the band of states 
to the northwest as far as Montana. Produced caterpillar 
traction for the tanks and artillery, guns, carriages, recupera- 
tors, projectiles, and grenades; the district was also saturated 
with contracts for machinery for the eastern munitions plants. 
Chief, Mr. E. A. Russell, vice-president of the Otis Elevator 
Company. 

Pittsburg. Included western Pennsylvania except three 
counties, two counties of western Maryland, two counties of 



1 so DEMOBILIZATION 

Ohio, and all of West Virginia. The prime subcontract dis« 
trict for the production of raw steel and steel forgings. Herein 
was located the Neville Island ordnance plant project. Pro- 
duced optical glass in quantity. Chief, Mr. Ralph M. Dravo, 
of Dravo Brothers, contractors, Pittsburg. 

Cincinnati. Southern Ohio, Indiana, and the South. Was 
the chief nitrogen-fixation district and the chief producer of 
smokeless powder. Included Dayton, with 2oo factories ex- 
clusively engaged in munitions production. Produced tanks, 
shell, fuses, optical instruments, and machine tools for war 
factories. District chief, Mr. C. L. Harrison, a Cincinnati 
capitalist. 

St. Louis. Included southern Indiana and sixteen western 
states. Produced black walnut, toluol, and picric acid. Chief, 
Mr. Marvin E. Singleton, former president of the East St. 
Louis Cotton Oil Company. 

After the armistice the manufacturing committees in charge 
of the twelve American ordnance districts became, without 
essential change in their organization, the ordnance district 
claims boards. Each board consisted of seven members — ^busi- 
ness men and at least one lawyer — with such technical assist- 
ants as they needed. The first executive act in demobilization 
for these boards to make was to determine what war contracts 
were to be terminated immediately, what ones were to be 
tapered off with a minimum expense to the Government and a 
minimum disturbance to industry and labor, and what ones 
were to be carried through to completion. 

It was often advantageous to allow the contractors to pro- 
ceed undisturbed. Some of these ordnance supplies, which 
would be valuable and essential items of our military equip- 
ment for years to come, were only just reaching the stage of 
production in the factories, after many months of costly ex- 
periment and preparation. It was obviously unwise to inter- 
rupt these projects with nothing to show for them except 
heavy bills of expenses. Then, too, it was sometimes of finan- 
cial advantage to the Government to allow a contract to go 
through to completion. A contractor in the Chicago district, 



ORDNANCE DEMOBILIZATION 151 

for example, had nearly completed the manufacture of several 
large machines for installation in an eastern munitions plant. 
To cancel the contract would have cost the Government 
$90,000 in a settlement and left on its hands a quantity of 
semi-finished materials having only junk value. The Govern- 
ment no longer had use for the finished machines ; yet it would 
cost only $14,000 more to go on and complete them. This was 
done, and the Ordnance Department was later able to sell the 
machines to a private buyer for more than $100,000, thus 
recovering practically all the money it paid to the contractor. 

To provide a basis of fact for all such acts of administra- 
tion in the demobilization, the district boards first took a rapid 
but thorough inventory of the ordnance industrial situation. 
This they did by means of questionnaires sent to all the con- 
tractors. Each questionnaire, when returned to the district 
board, showed the status of the contract at the time and how 
the contractor's business and his employees would be affected 
by a termination. The general ordnance policy was to permit 
contractors (after the first emergency suspension which, it will 
be remembered, had been requested immediately after the 
armistice was signed) to continue their work on a diminishing 
scale for a few weeks, while they made their arrangements to 
engage once more in commercial work. Some of the contracts, 
including all the late, standardized ones, provided for the 
termination of work upon thirty days' notice. If, however, 
the enforcement of this provision would create any consider- 
able amount of unemployment, the district boards allowed 
such contractors to complete an average thirty days' produc- 
tion, but to spread out the work over a longer period of time. 

There were variations of the general policy when it was 
applied to special classes of ordnance industry. For instance, 
the many contractors who were machine-finishing the artillery 
shell were permitted to keep their plants in full operation until 
January 31, 1919, when the work had to cease abruptly. All 
source industries — industries, that is, producing rough forg- 
ings and other raw and semi-finished materials for ordnance 
manufacture — were taken from war work forthwith. Then, 



152 DEMOBILIZATION 

too, as noted, in various classes of large ordnance, or ordnance 
of exceedingly difficult manufacture, the orders were greatly- 
reduced and the contractors permitted to go ahead and com- 
plete the residue, no matter how long it might take. Such ord- 
nance included gun carriages, recuperators, tanks, optical 
instruments, and other supplies of the sort. This reduced pro- 
duction continued for more than a year after the general stop- 
page of war industry. Some of the Mark VIII tanks (the 
Anglo-American design) were delivered to the Army as late 
as June i, 1920. 

So expeditiously was the work of termination carried on in 
the other classes of manufacture (and these made up the 
greater part of the ordnance industry) that by January 1, 
1919, nearly all war ordnance production had either been 
terminated altogether or was dwindling to the vanishing point 
under specific agreements. After February 1 the only war 
ordnance factories in operation were the exceptional plants 
noted in the preceding paragraph. 

Even as the ordnance industry was being stopped, the Gov- 
ernment was coming to an understanding with the ordnance 
contractors as to the settlement of their claims. To this end, 
in most of the manufacturing districts the board members 
traveled from city to city, addressing large meetings of the 
contractors and explaining to them the general liquidation 
policy adopted by the War Department. In its broad outlines, 
this policy was as follows: The Government would take off 
the contractor's hands at cost all materials which he had spe- 
cifically purchased for his contract, but which he had not 
used. The Government would reimburse him for all work done 
on his contract, for all materials used, for all money paid out 
in wages, and for all legitimate overhead expense, the Gov- 
ernment in return taking over all materials in the various 
stages of their completion. Further, the Government would 
regard as proper costs whatever it cost the contractor to ter- 
minate and settle his subcontracts, and would pay these costs. 
Finally, in specific instances the Government would pay 
money in amortization of the cost of machinery and tools 



ORDNANCE DEMOBILIZATION 153 

bought especially for war use, the sum to be proportioned to 
the amount of work completed. And whatever else the con- 
tractor was out of pocket legitimately, the Government would 
pay. When the various costs were brought together as a lump, 
to this sum the Government would add 10 per cent as profit. 
It would, moreover, allow 6 per cent interest on money which 
the contractor had invested in materials, reckoning from the 
average time of purchase to the date of the settlement; but it 
would not allow 10 per cent profit on this investment in addi- 
tion. 

These terms received widespread acceptance, although they 
allowed no prospective profits, and thereupon the various dis- 
tricts became scenes of great activity as the ordnance officers 
worked with the contractors to expedite the presentation of 
settlement claims by the latter. Inspectors and agents em- 
ployed by the district boards checked manufacturers' inven- 
tories, and boxed and set aside materials to be delivered to 
the Government, while district accountants audited the costs 
statements. Each field agent of a district board was made 
responsible for a few specific claims. He stood at the con- 
tractor's elbow and helped him rough out his claim into proper 
form. A spirit of amiability prevailed. For many reasons the 
contractor wished to make his settlement as quickly as possible, 
and the district agent was there to tell him what items in his 
claim were indisputable, and what ones were likely to be con- 
tested, thereby holding up the final settlement. When the dis- 
trict agent and the contractor had agreed as to a claim, they 
submitted it informally to one of the members of the district 
claims board for his opinion. If he thought his board would 
be unlikely to allow certain items, the contractor could usually 
be persuaded to omit such items. Claims prepared under such 
conditions presented little difficulty to the various claims 
boards, and most of them went through to settlement without 
a hitch in the proceedings. 

Most contractors were willing to forego their technical 
rights in order to save the Government from paying for use- 
less production, but a few were obdurate. One man, working 



154 DEMOBILIZATION 

under a contract with a thirty-day termination clause, delib- 
erately increased his rate of production five times in order to 
collect a maximum amount from the Government. When the 
Ordnance Department discovered his plan, it breached the con- 
tract outright and allowed the producer to take his grievance, 
if he continued to nurse one, into the courts. A rare instance 
of this sort, however, is cited only to show by contrast the 
prevalent attitude of industrial cooperation with the Govern- 
ment. Numerous producers omitted from their claims many 
items the validity of which could probably have been sus- 
tained in the future negotiations, but which were, however, 
subject to close scrutiny and therefore a factor of delay in the 
settlements. 

The wheels of war industry had not ceased to turn before 
the Government began to make advance payments in settle- 
ment of the industrial claims. If the contractors were generous, 
so was the Government. The first settlement made illustrated 
the War Department's attitude right through. A New York 
contractor had submitted a claim for about $15,000. On Jan- 
uary 20, 1919, he informed the New York District Claims 
Board that two days later he had to meet a note for $10,000, 
a debt incurred in prosecution of his war contract. A member 
of the New York Claims Board took this claim in person to 
Washington and next day secured its approval by the Ord- 
nance Claims Board, together with an authorization to ad- 
vance $10,000 to the contractor pending the final approval 
and settlement by the War Department Claims Board. The 
New York district finance officer paid over the $10,000 in 
time to save the note from going to protest. 

As the weeks went on the New York manufacturer's plight 
was duplicated over and over again. The producers of ord- 
nance supplies, after the termination of their contracts, faced 
enormous financial obligations which they would have to meet 
long before the machinery of liquidation could act upon their 
claims. To such producers the system of advance partial pay- 
ments afforded great relief. The policy of advance payments 
not only saved numerous concerns from financial ruin, but it 



ORDNANCE DEMOBILIZATION 155 

stimulated the general commercial reconstruction and resump- 
tion of normal business by releasing large sums of money and 
putting it again into circulation. And, it should not be for- 
gotten, the system greatly aided the Government to secure 
favorable settlement terms from the contractors by offering 
the reward of early payments to those whose war business was 
quickly liquidated. 

Since the prime contractors' subcontract settlements were 
acknowledged costs which the Government was bound to pay 
in the prime settlements, it was vitally important that the 
Ordnance Department intervene to obtain for the prime con- 
tractors the most favorable terms possible in the settlement of 
their subcontracts. Every subcontractor, of course, had the 
legal right to insist upon the full performance of his contract, 
and he was not to be coerced by the bogey of the Court of 
Claims and its long-drawn-out procedure. He could go into 
the state courts and enforce his rights within reasonable time. 
Therefore, it is indicative of the spirit of war industry that the 
ordance district claims boards found little difficulty in set- 
tling with the subcontractors on favorable terms. The prime 
contractors had no such interest in these terms as did the Gov- 
ernment, since, whatever the subcontract settlement costs might 
be, the Government would have to pay them. The agents of 
the district boards readily persuaded the subcontractors, as a 
sporting proposition, to surrender their prospective profits 
voluntarily and accept the profit of 10 per cent on work 
actually done, even as the prime contractors, who had assumed 
the chief risk in the first place, had been willing to do. The 
efforts of the ordnance field agents in this direction saved the 
Government many millions. 

The first complete claim received by the Ordnance Claims 
Board came from the Detroit district on January 10, 1919. 
The first claim to go through to final settlement by the Ord- 
nance Claims Board was passed on February 20. The district 
claims boards sent the bulky and valuable settlement papers to 
Washington by courier rather than entrust them to the mails. 
When the system settled into its routine the Ordnance Claims 



156 DEMOBILIZATION 

Board passed upon the average claim within a week after its 
arrival in Washington. On the average the Government paid 
in the settlement of ordnance contractors' claims an amount 
equal to about 12 per cent of the face value of the uncom- 
pleted portions of the contracts. The average ordnance con- 
tract entailed a government obligation somewhere between 
$100,000 and $250,000 in amount, but many were much 
larger. The Marlin-Rockwell Corporation of New Haven, 
Connecticut, one of the chief producers of machine guns and 
small arms, presented a claim for nearly $14,000,000. One 
of the largest war contracts was that with the American Car & 
Foundry Company, of a face value of over $100,000,000. In 
contrast, the New York Ordnance District Claims Board, 
which settled that contract, settled another (a subcontract) for 
$1.50. The claim of the DuPont Powder Company against the 
Ordnance Department was for about $3,280,000 — this in 
settlement of contracts with a value of $50,000,000. The New 
York Air Brake Company presented to the Rochester Ordnance 
Claims Board claims aggregating $9,000,000. The New York 
District board settled 206 claims for $1.00 each, the con- 
tractors voluntarily refraining from presenting any claims 
above the statutory dollar which had to be paid to make the 
settlement legal. 

Many were the interesting episodes which occurred during 
the ordnance liquidation. The St. Louis district was the chief 
source of black walnut timber secured during the war. Walnut 
was used in making gunstocks and airplane propellers. In hunt- 
ing for walnut in this district we discovered that we were 
gleaning where Germany had reaped before us. The former 
solid stands of walnut in this district had been cleaned out 
in recent years, much of the timber having been shipped to 
Germany via the Gulf ports. Yet our gleaning was successful. 
Walnut trees, growing as individuals or in small groups, were 
still to be found along the country lanes, in farm lots, at the 
edges of orchards, and shading the grounds of the farmsteads. 
Nowhere were more than thirty trees in a group discovered. 
Consequently an adequate supply of walnut for the muni- 



ORDNANCE DEMOBILIZATION 157 

tions plants depended upon a foot-by-foot search of the entire 
American countryside in the walnut regions. In this work the 
Government was assisted by tens of thousands of volunteers 
aroused to the need by the widespread publicity. The Boy 
Scouts turned their hikes into walnut-hunting expeditions. 
The country doctor, the circuit-riding clergyman, the bee 
hunter, and the muskrat trapper all made it their business to 
locate and report stands of walnut timber. As a result unex- 
pectedly ample quantities of the wood were secured from 
regions supposedly denuded of it. On the day of the armistice 
the timber dealers found themselves stocked up with enough 
black walnut to meet all commercial demands for five years 
ahead. 

One of the Ordnance Department's timber cruisers located 
a grove of black walnut trees shading the farm home of a 
woman living in Missouri. She hated to sacrifice her trees, but 
listened to the appeal of patriotism and accepted an offer of 
$1,100 for them. Then, when the agent had left with her 
signed agreement in his pocket, she repented of her bargain 
and grieved so much at her forthcoming loss that the village 
minister suggested a remedy. He told her that the anticipated 
proceeds of the sale would pay for an automobile in which 
she could ride about the country and, amid the pleasant rural 
scenes, forget about the devastation soon to be staged in her 
own front yard. She acted on this suggestion, bought a car 
for $1,080, and in payment gave a note which she agreed to 
lift when the Government took the trees and paid her the 
money. The armistice intervened before the timber cutters 
appeared, and the Ordnance Department canceled the con- 
tract with the timber dealer. That left the woman with a half- 
used car, a note maturing in the bank to meet which she had 
no funds, and a clump of walnut trees for which the Govern- 
ment had no use. The St. Louis District Claims Board could 
not relieve her distress, but a member of the board brought the 
case to the attention of a meeting of war contractors; and it 
was arranged for the Missouri lady to keep both her automo- 
bile and her walnut trees. 



158 DEMOBILIZATION 

The New York District Claims Board settled for $275,000 
the claim of the Wah Chang Trading Corporation, of China, 
which supplied a large amount of antimony used in making 
shrapnel bullets. In the New York district also there had been 
a contract with the Japan Paper Company to supply paper 
parachutes for carrying floating signal lights. The contract 
was not a large one ; yet in its settlement it was disclosed that 
there were about 10,000 subcontractors — individual Japanese 
families working in their own homes in Japan. Under the cir- 
cumstances the board waived the usual rule that with every 
prime contract claim must be filed statements of settlement 
certified by every subcontractor. 

Each of the district claims boards maintained in its quar- 
ters a progress chart which showed graphically each day the 
amount of industrial liquidation accomplished and the amount 
remaining to be done. In eleven of the districts this chart took 
the form of a thermometer, the rising mercury showing the 
amount of completed work. In the twelfth — at Cleveland — 
the chart was a representation of a bottle containing a cele- 
brated beverage that does duty in these dry days for beer, 
and the task of the board was to empty this container. 

On the first anniversary of the armistice the Ordnance De- 
partment's system of industrial demobilization had cleared up 
a large part of the war business. The district boards had passed 
upon 94 per cent of all contractors' claims presented, and the 
Ordnance Claims Board in Washington had disposed of 73 
per cent of the ordnance claims. The settlements at this time 
had cost the United States nearly $131,000,000, but that sum 
had settled uncompleted portions of contracts to the value of 
approximately $1,000,000,000; and, in finding the net cost of 
the liquidation to the United States, from the sum paid out 
in these settlements there was still to be subtracted the receipts 
from the sale of materials taken over in the settlements. By 
the end of 1919 the district boards had passed 97 per cent of 
all claims and the Ordnance Claims Board 81 per cent. By 
that time the total amount approved for payment in adjusting 
the claims was more than $166,000,000. 



ORDNANCE DEMOBILIZATION 159 

In the latter part of 1919, however, a different system of 
settlement went into effect. By that time about three-fourths 
of the ordnance claims had been settled, in a spirit essentially 
of bargain and compromise, the Government yielding points 
and the contractors yielding them in order to reach swift 
agreements. Those who did the bargaining for the Government 
were for the most part the original members of the district 
organizations, the men who had been in touch with the indus- 
try from the start. As the unfinished business diminished in 
quantity, however, the members of the district claims boards 
one by one left the government service and returned to their 
own affairs, until by the autumn of 1919 the boards were 
made up largely of new members, most of them uniformed 
army officers who bore no such intimate relationship to the 
contractors. Within the Government, too, there was a grow- 
ing spirit of criticism of the bargaining method of settling the 
contracts, even though the bargains had been highly advan- 
tageous to the Government. It was felt that more conventional 
methods should be employed. The result was a marked slowing 
down in the rate of industrial demobilization in the Ordnance 
Department. 

It seems fitting here to say a word for the men who manu- 
factured our ordnance during the war. The popular picture of 
a war contractor is that of a man swollen with new wealth and 
spending his money in riotous extravagances. This indictment, 
at any rate, cannot hold against the ordnance maker. Instead 
of profiting, the average ordnance contractor was glad enough 
to get out of the enterprise with a whole financial skin. Many 
were not so fortunate. An impartial investigation made by the 
Ordnance Department over its entire war manufacturing field 
showed that not more than one contractor in three or four, 
when the business was closed up, had anything to show for his 
war experience except the self-satisfying sense of having 
served his country. 

In the light of the fact that so few of them profited at all 
and so many incurred actual loss, it is remarkable that they 
were not more grasping in the demobilization settlements; but 



i6o DEMOBILIZATION 

the eternal fact remains that they were inclined to ask for 
less, rather than more, than was coming to them under their 
legal rights. This attitude was consistent with their whole 
attitude during the war. In the history of American industry 
there is no chapter more creditable to it than that of the atti- 
tude and accomplishments of the producers of ordnance dur- 
ing the World War, These men entered the undertaking with 
a zeal unsurpassed in any other part of the war organization. 
Working under an urgency such as American industry had 
never before experienced, they accepted the handicaps that 
had been placed upon the nation by its own peace-loving 
traditions and worked together as a unit to overcome the 
handicaps. They transformed their manufacturing plants with 
never a thought for the business they would one day have to 
resume. They undertook to produce, in quantities never before 
even projected, intricate materials of warfare the very names 
of which were unfamiliar to them. Despite the mounting costs 
of materials and labor, they managed to hammer down the 
prices of rifles, machine guns, explosives, shrapnel, and other 
important commodities, delivering to the Government not 
only a superior product, but a product costing the Govern- 
ment less than other nations at war paid for the same things. 
To accomplish this result they threw their normal rivalries on 
the scrap heap, opened up their trade secrets to each other, and 
virtually became partners in the single enterprise of supplying 
the American troops with the best munitions which American 
industry could produce. 

As a rule, the profit-making war contractor was one who 
supplied commodities essentially like those produced in nor- 
mal times. But supplies of this sort were almost unknown in 
the whole range of ordnance. The typical thing was to find on 
the day of the armistice the ordnance plant which had not yet 
come into full production under the original contract. This 
was because of the difficulties encountered in producing the 
more important items of ordnance. The months of the war 
had been marked by the heavy expenditure of money in the 
expansion of plants and the development of processes, and 



ORDNANCE DEMOBILIZATION 161 

the armistice cut off the development before it had reached 
the profitable stage. 

The producers did not attempt to recoup in the business 
liquidation that followed. These sentences are not intended to 
give a clean bill of health to the whole body of ordnance 
producers — some few of them sought to get more than they 
were morally entitled to get; some few, like the country horse 
trader, adopted the age-old procedure of barter by asking more 
than they expected to get. But where one man held out for 
the last penny of his rights, there could be found half a dozen 
others who put in no claims at all for money to which they 
were justly entitled. The great steel-producing industry, in 
particular, showed an aristocratic contempt of requiring its 
full due. Many steel producers pocketed their losses without 
a word: in fact, the Government settled a surprising number 
of ordnance contracts for the statutory one dollar apiece and 
thus saved itself millions for which it was legally liable. When 
the curious ordnance officers asked some of these contractors 
why they did not claim their full rights, they responded that 
the victory over Germany was compensation enough for 
them. As one of them expressed it, the achievements of the 
American boys in France had given him his run for his money. 

In the Pittsburg district two steel producers had been en- 
gaged on contracts for essentially the same sort of material 
and on about the same scale. One was a small concern which 
had been kept at its wits' end most of the time to finance its 
war enterprise. The other was one of the largest corporations 
in the United States, with ample financial resources. Into the 
Ordnance Claims Board came two claims terminating con- 
tracts of approximately identical characteristics. One of the 
claims was several times larger than the other, and naturally 
the Washington authorities questioned the larger claim. They 
found that the latter was a just claim in every particular. The 
discovery was made that the smaller of the two claims had 
asked for an amount in settlement much below what the pro- 
ducer was entitled to receive. The larger claim had been sub- 
mitted by the producer whose finances could not stand any 



i62 DEMOBILIZATION 

loss; the smaller by the great corporation referred to above. 
Both were allowed in full. 

Of the 317 large ordnance contracts in the Pittsburg dis- 
trict, the Government settled 149, involving a total obliga- 
tion of more than $23,000,000, for $1.00 each. In this and 
other districts thousands of subcontractors forgave the prime 
contractors their legal obligations without the transfer of a 
penny. In the Philadelphia district the prime contractors 
cleared up thousands of their subcontracts and said nothing 
about them in their liquidation claims. These instances of 
generosity were discovered only when the Ordnance Depart- 
ment checked up to find out why the final settlement costs 
were so much lower than the preliminary estimate of those 
costs, made in the first hurried days after the armistice. 

The record of American ordnance production was not a 
flawless one — it was too large to be that — but in view of the 
general attitude of the producers, it is submitted that to have 
participated in that war industry was a distinguished honor. 



CHAPTER XI 
ARTILLERY 

THERE was a great deal more to the demobilization of 
the war ordnance industry than the mere office opera- 
tion of settling with the contractors. It included an 
immense field activity of utmost practical interest both to the 
War Department and to the public. The armistice found the 
United States in a state of industrial preparation for war that 
would have been unattainable under any other circumstances. 
The world situation had forced us to turn American industry 
into a vast munitions plant which, at the cessation of hostili- 
ties, was just beginning to get into production with some of 
the most essential materials of warfare. That plant had been 
acquired only at the cost of heavy mortgage (in the form of 
government war bonds) placed upon the future, and hence it 
would have been folly to close out the business entirely with 
nothing to show for the whole effort but debts and the realiza- 
tion that the existence of the business had had a psychological 
effect in winning the war and protecting the United States. 
The sensible thing to do was to save out of the dismantling 
of war industry a material equipment which should afford 
national military insurance for years to come; and that was 
what the Ordnance Department did. 

In building up this equipment the Ordnance Department 
was confronted with the three major questions of (i) what 
quantities of materials to allow the industry to go on and 
produce before closing down finally, (2) what to do with the 
buildings and machinery which the Government had provided 
for the enterprise, and (3) what disposition to make of sur- 
pluses of both materials and facilities beyond the Govern- 
ment's future needs. 



1 64 DEMOBILIZATION 

Artillery constitutes the most important of all war sup- 
plies. Upon the production of artillery and iiis ammunition 
the Government expended more money than upon any other 
single class of materials. From a manufacturing standpoint, a 
unit of artillery consists of three principal parts — the gun 
tube itself, the recuperator (or recoil mechanism), and the 
carriage with its attending caissons. Each of these manufac- 
turing phases called into existence during 1917-1918 huge 
industries. On the day of the armistice nineteen mills, built 
new from the ground up, were turning out gun and howitzer 
tubes at the rate of nearly 800 a month, a figure that may be 
contrasted with the annual American production of seventy- 
five guns before 1917. Five great plants, built new at a cost of 
many millions, were engaged in building recuperators of 
French design, and other producers were manufacturing 
American- and British-type recoil mechanisms. The carriages, 
limbers, and caissons, being, after all, wheeled vehicles, 
offered no particular manufacturing problem, and it was there- 
fore unnecessary to create a new industry to produce them. 
Nevertheless, the carriage contracts engaged a large section of 
the car- and truck-building industries of the United States. 
Yet, for the reason that the vehicle builders could come 
quickly into the production of artillery carriages, the physical 
demobilization of this branch of the industry offered little 
difficulty, the chief problems centering around the termination 
of the production of gun tubes and recuperators. These prob- 
lems involved questions of reserves to be produced before the 
industries were dissolved and the storage afterwards of the 
manufacturing facilities to give the United States a potential 
producing capacity that could be quickly utilized in the event 
of another war. 

Several important considerations influenced the responses 
to these questions. In the first place our whole artillery manu- 
facturing project had been aimed at the year 1919, and in the 
interim the American Expeditionary Forces purchased heavy 
quantities of artillery in France and England — in all, nearly 
5,500 field guns of the latest and best designs. Including cap- 



1 1 



--* jg 







^§ 




Photo by Howard E. Coffin 

HAVOC WROUGHT BY GERMAN GUNS AT FORT 
NEAR RHEIMS 




Photo by Howard E. Coffin 

"WIPERS" READY FOR TOURISTS 




Photo by Howard E. Coffin 

FRENCH AND GERMAN AIRPLANE ENGINES AFTER 
COMBAT 




Photo by Howard E. Coffin 

RUINED TANKS NEAR CAMBRAI 



ARTILLERY 165 

tured 7nateriel, the A. E. F, sent back to the United States 
after the armistice about 6,000 guns, with their full equip- 
ment of limbers, caissons, and supply vehicles. This in itself 
was a quantity sufficient to arm a large field force ; and, on the 
face of it, this reserve seemed to make unnecessary any post- 
armistice production at all from our own ordnance plants. As 
a counterbalance, however, there was the industrial situation. 
The gun plants were heavy employers of labor. To close them 
all down forthwith might have created a serious amount of 
unemployment, to the detriment of the national prosperity. 
Then, too, it was good business to order the completion of 
materiel almost complete on the day of the armistice, and this 
procedure was adopted as a general policy. 

General rules and policies could at best serve the field men 
of the Ordnance Department only as rough guides. Each of 
the nineteen gun factories supplied its own special problems 
in demobilization. The process of closing down the factories 
may be shown by the example of what went on after the armi- 
stice at the plant of the Bullard Engineering Works at Bridge- 
port, Connecticut. 

This was a plant producing 155-millimeter guns — the tubes 
only. The 155, a French weapon, was the highest-powered 
fieldpiece used by the A. E. F., the railroad guns not being 
considered to be field guns. The supply of the useful 155 was 
never equal to the demand. The French factories could not 
deliver as many as the A. E. F. needed; and, because of the 
difficulty of producing the recuperator, our own industry did 
not succeed in turning out a single completely assembled unit 
before the armistice, although all parts had been successfully 
produced ready for assembling. Here, then, was an important 
class of artillery in which a shortage existed, and therefore 
the Ordnance Department was liberal in allowing production 
after the armistice. 

The Bullard Engineering Works held contracts calling for 
the production of 1,400 155-millimeter gun tubes. On the first 
day of the armistice it had delivered forty-five finished tubes, 
and 500 others were progressing through the plant in various 



i66 DEMOBILIZATION 

stages of completion. Many of these incomplete units had 
passed through the difficult shrinking process. Guns are built 
up in layers of steel, each one heated, superimposed upon the 
adjoining one, and then shrunk on in various cooling processes, 
thus putting into the steel strata a compression that enables 
the gun to sustain tremendous interior pressures without dis- 
tortion. The ordnance officers looked at the status of work at 
the BuUard plant and ordered the completion of the 500 units 
in process, terminating the rest of the great contract. 

This action was taken on the eleventh day of the armistice. 
The company expected to be able to complete the remaining 
500 guns in six months, a course that would enable the manu- 
facture to taper off and the gunmakers to find other employ- 
ment. Two months later it was found that other industry was 
readily absorbing the excess labor of the gun plant, and there- 
fore another cut was made in the contemplated production, 
the number of completions ordered being reduced to 262 in 
number. These were to be finished by April 15, 1919, after 
which war work at the plant was to cease entirely. 

Note, now, the measures adopted in terminating the work. 
It is evident that the post-armistice operation was going to 
deliver to the Government 262 finished guns and 238 unfin- 
ished ones. The latter would stand for a government expendi- 
ture of millions of dollars. As an industrial commodity these 
unfinished tubes would have value only as scrap steel, to be 
melted up and made into other things. Yet to the Government 
they possessed a real military value. In the event of another 
war occurring before the present-day types of artillery become 
obsolete, the Army would need not only reserves of guns ready 
for use, but also another great gunmaking industry, to pro- 
duce for an indefinitely expanding field force. Therefore 
proper war reserves should consist not only of guns, but also 
of reserve facilities for manufacturing guns — machinery and 
tools, designs, plans, and instructions, and, especially, the 
rough forgings of gun elements, so that, the moment a new 
gun factory was organized and equipped, it could start work- 
ing, without having to wait weeks and months until the raw 



ARTILLERY 167 

materials came up from the forging plants. The BuUard 
Works were instructed to stop work on the incompleted units 
at such points as would enable future gunmakers, if necessary, 
to resume the work without difficulty. All incomplete units, 
however, were to be carried through the shrinking process be- 
fore being dropped. The various hoops and jackets which are 
shrunk upon gun tubes are machined to a precision expressed 
in thousandths of an inch. In heavy metal working, such exact- 
ness is ordinarily unknown. It is evident that only a little rust- 
ing would destroy the fit of the contact surfaces and ruin the 
unassembled jackets and hoops, and therefore the company 
was instructed to assemble these otherwise perishable elements 
before stopping the work. After the shrinking, all uncompleted 
pieces were slushed in grease, packed for protection, and 
stored away, to be used, according to the plan, in the manu- 
facture which will be necessary in the peace-time maintenance 
of the artillery equipment. Some of the incomplete Bullard 
tubes of the 155's were later transferred to the Watervliet 
Arsenal and finished with the machinery there. The arsenal 
completed 300 guns of this size after the armistice. 

This, essentially, so far as the partially finished units were 
concerned, was the procedure followed by the Ordnance De- 
partment in all nineteen emergency gun plants. Although the 
mills turning out rough forgings for the gun plants were taken 
from this branch of war work immediately after the armistice, 
the Ordnance Department reserved and stored a supply of 
forgings in order to keep the future gun plants in operation 
until new forging mills can come into production. 

Seventeen of the emergency gun plants were closed out 
altogether after the armistice. Two remain among the war 
assets of the United States, held "in ordinary," as the phrase 
goes, meaning that they are closed, but ready with machinery 
and materials in all stages of completion to start up in full 
operation as soon as the workmen can be recruited and the fires 
started. These two additions to our arsenal system were named 
the Rochester Gun Plant and the Erie Howitzer Plant; and 
at these two plants and at the government arsenals the Ord- 



1 68 DEMOBILIZATION 

nance Department concentrated the great equipment of ma- 
chinery, tools, plans, and materials left on its hands after the 
dissolution of the gunmaking industry created by the war, 
all stored so systematically that the War Department, at any 
time for years to come, can, in theory, at any rate, quickly 
reestablish a gun industry on the scale known in 1918. Recently 
it has been proposed to transfer the facilities at Rochester to 
some other place. 

The existence of this manufacturing equipment in the pos- 
session of the Ordnance Department gives the United States 
a stronger military potentiality than the nation ever possessed 
before. For the first time in our history the Government itself 
during peace is in possession of extensive facilities for the 
manufacture of light and medium-heavy artillery. Before the 
war the Army procured all its field guns (and those only in 
negligible quantities) principally from private makers. Its two 
gunmaking arsenals, Watertown and Watervliet, turned out 
principally large guns for fixed mounting at the coastal forts. 
Before showing what was done at the Rochester and Erie 
plants, it is worth while pausing to note the legacy received 
from the war industry of 1917-1918 by the two established 
gunmaking arsenals. 

The Watertown Arsenal is to-day the War Department's 
chief permanent establishment for the production of gun 
forgings. Watervliet is the great gun-finishing plant. At a cost 
of many millions these two institutions were built up and 
expanded on a vast scale during the war. After the armistice 
these two arsenals received the reserve supply of machinery 
and materials used in making the heavier field guns — prin- 
cipally 155-millimeter guns and 240-millimeter howitzers — 
forging machinery at Watertown, finishing machinery at 
Watervliet. For the manufacture of lighter guns, the machin- 
ery has been stored principally at the new Rochester and Erie 
plants. 

With the new equipment installed at the Watervliet Ar- 
senal during the war, that institution reached a productive 
capacity of sixty 155-millimeter guns a month and sixty 240- 



ARTILLERY 169 

millimeter howitzers. These facilities to-day are set up and 
ready for immediate operation. But in addition to the arsenal's 
own proper plant, the Ordnance Department has stored at 
Watervliet reserve machinery sufficient to manufacture fifty- 
two 155-millimeter howitzers, seventeen 4.7-inch guns, and 
forty-nine 75-millimeter guns every month. This machinery, 
in the event of another war, is to be shipped to emergency war 
plants and set up in them. Besides this, all the war-time equip- 
ment for producing anti-aircraft guns has been stored at 
Watervliet. One of the later inventive developments of the 
World War was to increase the power of the already powerful 
155-millimeter gun by increasing its caliber to 194 millimeters 
and adding to its length, making an entirely new weapon, but 
one of the same type as the 155. None of these guns was 
actually built during the war, but machinery able to produce 
twenty of them every month is included within the equipment 
at Watervliet, one-third of this machinery set up and needing 
only slight rearrangement and modification to be ready for 
immediate operation. 

All this equipment at Watervliet for the production of 
medium-weight field guns is idle and probably will remain so 
as long as the great reserve of finished artillery accumulated 
during the war continues to have military value. Unless 
another great war comes to upset the plans, the only produc- 
tion of light field artillery in this country for many years 
henceforth will be that resulting from the operation of a small 
experimental gun plant at Watervliet, to be maintained in 
operation to the sole end that the United States may keep 
pace with the progress of artillery manufacture. Whenever 
improvements are devised, the necessary changes will, if Con- 
gress provides the funds and present ambitions are realized, 
be made in the reserve machinery to enable it to turn out the 
improved models from the start of operation. 

Meanwhile Watervliet and Watertown will continue to be 
what they were before 1917 — the main reliance of the Army 
for its guns of the largest calibers for use at the coastal forts 
and on railway mounts. At best, the production of such weap- 



170 DEMOBILIZATION 

ons is a slow and intricate process, and the only way to procure 
a supply of them is to keep producing them all the time. 
Watertown makes the forgings for these guns, and Watervliet, 
with its own great equipment augmented by machinery from 
the dismantled war plants, can now manufacture guns up to 
16 inches in caliber and howitzers from 12 to 16 inches. At 
Watervliet, too, has been stored some of the machinery from 
the American Ordnance Base Depot in France for relining big 
guns and restoring them to use. 

Now let us look at the two chief auxiliaries to the two gun- 
making arsenals, the Rochester Gun Plant and the Erie 
Howitzer Plant, which are now "stand-by" factories for the 
production of field artillery of the smaller sizes — 75-milli- 
meter and 4.7-inch guns and 155-millimeter howitzers. The 
Rochester Gun Plant, with its own war tools and with the 
equipment concentrated there during the demobilization, is 
now equipped to turn out 360 75-millimeter guns every month. 
Its equipment includes not only the elaborate finishing ma- 
chinery, but also a shop capable of heat-treating and rough- 
machining 200 sets of black forgings for the gun every month. 
This plant alone can produce 75's to keep pace with the needs 
of a great army, including its battle wastage, until a new gun 
industry can come into existence. All the buildings are new 
steel and concrete structures. The plant was built on twelve 
and a half acres of ground at Rochester during the war by the 
Symington-Anderson Company for the Government. This site 
is now leased by the Government. Its purchase would guaran- 
tee the continued existence of this important military asset. 

The Rochester plant is held entirely in ordinary : machinery 
slushed in grease and boxed, and materials at hand in every 
department ready for machining, but watchmen the only occu- 
pants of the buildings. Not the least important part of the 
plant's equipment is a book containing a detailed mechanical 
description of every one of the 521 manufacturing operations 
in the production of a 75-millimeter gun, and including even 
a chart showing the correct organization of the working forces 
at the plant. Even such complete plans, however, cannot be 



ARTILLERY 171 

made to include the small kinks and short cuts of shop prac- 
tice, which must be developed and learned by actual expe- 
rience at the machines. Any future force of plant operatives, 
therefore, would have to learn the obscure secrets of manu- 
facture before the plant could reach great efficiency. 

At the Erie Howitzer Plant a similar procedure was fol- 
lowed. Here, on eleven acres of what had been vacant ground 
in August, 1917, the American Brake Shoe & Foundry Com- 
pany six months later turned out finished 155-millimeter 
howitzers and reached a productive capacity of twelve how- 
itzers daily before the armistice. The plant stands to-day as a 
complete gun factory, although all its equipment is greased 
and housed up, and its bays echo only to the steps of watch- 
men. While it was selected chiefly to be the stand-by plant for 
the production of 155-millimeter howitzers, at the shop has 
been concentrated the machinery and tooling used by the 
Northwestern Ordnance Company to produce 4.7-inch guns 
at its war plant at Madison, Wisconsin. This machinery had 
a capacity of four such guns daily. The howitzer shop and the 
gun shop occupy separate buildings. In the third building has 
been installed machinery for producing shell for 155-milli- 
meter guns. 

The machinery set up at Erie is designed to allow for 
increases in the powers of the two weapons to be made there. 
The howitzer can be increased in length (thereby increasing 
its range), and the 4.7-inch gun can be increased to 5 inches 
in caliber, without requiring fundamental changes in the 
machinery. 

The present industrial position of the United States with 
respect to the manufacture of mobile field artillery may be 
seen in the following tabular summing up of the preceding 
paragraphs : 



172 DEMOBILIZATION 



Place of ' 




Monthly Production 


Manufacture 


Type of Weapon 


Capacity 


Rochester Gun Plant 


75-millimeter gun 


360 


Watervliet Arsenal 


75-millimeter gun 


49 


Erie Howitzer Plant 


4.7-inch gun 


100 


Watervliet Arsenal 


4.7-inch gun 


17 


Erie Howitzer Plant 


155-millimeter howitzer 


200 


Watervliet Arsenal 


155-millimeter howitzer 


52 


Watervliet Arsenal 


155-millimeter gun 


60 


Watervliet Arsenal 


240-millimetcr howitzer 


60 


Total monthly gunmaking capacity 


898 



These fine weapons, all but one of which were designed by 
the French, the builders of the finest field artillery known, and 
manufactured only in France before the war, would be useless 
without recuperators, the recoil-absorbing mechanisms which 
make modern quick firing possible. Along with the guns there 
came to us the designs for the four French hydropneumatic 
recuperators. The French hesitated in the beginning about 
giving us their recuperator plans — not because they did not 
desire us to have the best in artillery, but because they thought, 
with much justification, that we should never be able to build 
them in time to be of service in the World War, although it 
was possible that after the war, by long and determined effort, 
we might be able to train mechanics who could make them. 
Only the sudden termination of the war, however, kept 
American-built French recuperators from serving at the front, 
for every one was successfully produced in this country before 
the armistice, including a single specimen of the perplexing 
75-millimeter recuperator. Three immense, specially equipped 
plants and two government arsenals produced them. 

Millions of dollars were spent in preparing to build French 
recuperators. The Singer Manufacturing Company built a 
gr^at plant at Elizabethport, New Jersey, to make 75-milli- 
meter recuperators. The Rock Island Arsenal equipped a new 
department to build this same mechanism. Dodge Brothers 
spent $11,000,000 on an immense plant at Detroit for the 
manufacture of the recuperators for 155-millimeter guns and 



ARTILLERY 173 

. howitzers, separate designs, and separate manufacturing propo- 
sitions. The fourth type, the 240, was put in production at a 
plant equipped for the purpose at Chicago by the Otis Eleva- 
tor Company. Only one of the mechanisms, the 155-millimeter 
howitzer recuperator, reached the stage of quantity production 
before the armistice. For the millions spent on the others the 
Government had only the experience and a quantity of forg- 
ings and semi-finished recuperators possessing only scrap value 
as they existed on the day of the armistice. Therefore the 
Ordnance Department did not stop this vital production at 
once after the armistice. 

The Singer Company was working on orders for 2,500 75- 
millimeter recuperators. Although it had not succeeded in 
turning out a single acceptable recuperator by November 11, 
1918, its processes had been refined almost to the point where 
they could begin producing these beautiful pieces of metallic 
sculpture in quantity. The Willys-Overland Company had 
built about 300 carriages for the French 75 by the date of the 
armistice, and it was decided to allow the Singer Company to 
build recuperators for these carriages and an additional 450 
as a reserve. Considerations of economy later held the Singer 
Company to a total production of 247 recuperators, resulting 
in a shortage as compared with the carriages. 

Meanwhile, be it remembered, the Rock Island Arsenal was 
working on 75-millimeter recuperators. It was decided to 
retain the recuperator department as an active branch of the 
arsenal. The arsenal was a little ahead of the Singer Company 
in the development, for it had actually produced an acceptable 
recuperator before the armistice; and it had 542 others in 
process in the shop. The arsenal's production proper was there- 
fore limited to this number, but the incomplete units from 
Elizabethport were later transferred to Rock Island, and the 
arsenal eventually completed ^^^ 75-millimeter recuperators 
before closing down the department. These were pronounced 
to be in every way the equal of the French product. 

The War Department provided no arsenal facilities for the 
production of recuperators for the 155-millimeter guns and 



174 DEMOBILIZATION 

howitzers, but centered its entire program for both mechanisms . 
in the Dodge plant at Detroit. After the armistice it was first 
decided to retain the Dodge factory as a stand-by recuperator 
plant. All machinery and materials were protected against 
deterioration, and the plant, under guard, was added to the 
arsenal system, ranking as a subsidiary to the Rock Island 
Arsenal. Later the Dodge plant was sold, and nearly half of 
its machinery was moved to Rock Island. 

The plan of artillery demobilization and industrial pre- 
paredness in this direction is now evident. Watertown Arsenal 
is the development center for the raw materials of artillery 
manufacture. Watervliet Arsenal, with its stand-by plants at 
Rochester and Erie, is the gun-producing center. Rock Island 
Arsenal is the center for gun carriages and recuperators. 

One exception to this scheme is to be noted. The war-time 
producers of the 240-millimeter recuperators were two — the 
Otis Elevator Company at Chicago and the Watertown Ar- 
senal. The Otis plant, originally having orders for 1,000 
recuperators, was ordered to finish 250 of them after the armi- 
stice. Thereafter some of its machinery was transferred and 
stored at the Watertown Arsenal, which thus remains as the 
manufacturing center for this heavy mechanism. 

There was no need for the Ordnance Department during 
the demobilization to exercise so much care looking to the 
future production of artillery carriages, and for the reason 
mentioned, that the manufacture of carriages was easier than 
the manufacture of guns and recuperators. Carriages can be 
produced with machinery essentially the same as that used in 
making motor trucks, street cars, and other heavy vehicles. 
Consequently, the War Department contented itself with re- 
serving enough machinery to equip at Rock Island Arsenal 
a model carriage-building department large enough to main- 
tain the existing reserves of artillery and to experiment with 
new designs. This plant can now manufacture every month 
one hundred carriages for the lighter field artillery — for the 
75's, the 4.7's, and the 155's, both howitzers and guns. In 
addition, at Rock Island have been concentrated jigs, fixtures, 



ARTILLERY 175 

gauges, and special tools used by the war factories, this equip- 
ment being boxed, catalogued, and ready for instant ship- 
ment to commercial factories that may be called upon to build 
artillery carriages in a hurry. No machine tools used in car- 
riage building, however, have been retained. 

The same economic, military, and business reasons that influ- 
enced the post-armistice production of guns and recuperators, 
controlled also the closing down of the carriage plants. There 
was a considerable production of field artillery carriages after 
the immediate military need for them had passed. 

The artillery war orders called for the production of about 
20,000 complete units, a unit being a gun, recuperator, car- 
riage, and accompanying limbers and caissons. The total pro- 
duction attributable to the war was 6,663 complete units, 
produced about half before the armistice and half afterwards. 
The value of this materiel^ together with the semi-finished 
components retained, was about $300,000,000. 

After the armistice the General Staff adopted the policy that 
in the demobilization sufficient mobile field artillery should 
be retained to equip an army of twenty divisions — 800,000 
men — with reserves to take care of battle wastage over a 
period of six months, during which interval a new artillery 
industry would be brought into existence. It is interesting to 
note how completely the Ordnance Department met this 
policy. Including the 6,000 field guns brought back by the 
American Expeditionary Forces (this figure not including 
captured materiet)^ the Army now has an equipment of about 
10,000 artillery units.* The staff plan indicates 2,583 as the 
proper number of 75-millimeter guns to be in reserve: the 
Army actually possesses 6,000. The projected army of twenty 
divisions needs 986 155-millimeter howitzers: the War De- 
partment owns 2,171. The projected force should have 976 
155-millimeter guns: the Army to-day owns 993. These liberal 
margins obtain throughout the range of mobile field guns. 

* The A. E. F. importations include all American-made guns shipped to 
France, these same guns also being included among the 6,663 units noted as 
built in the United States. 



176 DEMOBILIZATION 

On the theory (and it is a correct theory) that all the 
money put into artillery before the armistice should be charged 
off as part of the cost of victory, the post-armistice production 
of field artillery was a prudent transaction for the War De- 
partment. By spending $6,000,000 on the completion of 75- 
millimeter materiel after the armistice, the Government ob- 
tained property worth over $14,500,000. By spending 
$1 1,000,000 in the 155-millimeter gun project after the armi- 
stice, the Government secured artillery worth $18,000,000. By 
spending $9,000,000 for 155-millimeter howitzers after the 
armistice, the Government obtained materiel valued at 
$15,000,000. 

The storage of the vast reserves of field artillery presented 
a special problem to the Ordnance Department after the armi- 
stice. Not only the guns themselves, but also the accessory 
vehicles, had to be stored, and the latter outnumbered the 
guns several times. For example, the American factories built 
18,000 caissons and 20,000 caisson limbers for 75-millimeter 
guns alone, and accessory vehicles in like proportions were 
brought back from France by the A. E. F. It required about 
5,000,000 square feet of storage space to house all the mate- 
riel. The Rock Island Arsenal was selected as the storage 
center for field artillery, augmented by storage facilities 
created at the Savanna Proving Ground in Illinois, the Erie 
Proving Ground in Ohio, and the Aberdeen Proving Ground 
in Maryland. Some of the artillery was stored at Raritan 
Arsenal in New Jersey and at Fort D. A. Russell in Wyoming. 
For storing the artillery the Ordnance Department used brick 
warehouses and also portable steel storehouses built originally 
to protect the reserve American artillery in France. The Ord- 
nance Department retained a complete engineering collection 
of the captured enemy artiller}% one example of every type, 
and this has been set up as an exhibit at Aberdeen. The collec- 
tion includes a complete unit of the famous German 42- 
centimeter howitzer used against the fortifications of Liege 
and Verdun. 

In demobilizing the industry which was producing our rail- 



ARTILLERY 177 

way artillery, the Ordnance Department again availed itself 
of the opportunity to provide for the future defense of the 
United States; and in this branch of war industry, too, we 
find the same tapering-off process after the armistice, the com- 
pletion of some materials which were nearing completion at 
the time of the armistice, and the retention of machinery to 
provide for a possible future industry. As a result of these 
measures, the Atlantic seaboard is now defended by a system 
of powerful guns mounted on railway cars and capable of 
being moved on the regular railroad tracks, supplemented by 
new tracks laid both during and since the war by the Coast 
Artillery Corps, to any point which may be in need of defense. 
Before 1917 all our coast-defense guns were mounted on fixed 
emplacements at the forts. Camp Abraham Eustis, which 
sprang into existence during the war as the embarkation camp 
for artillery at Newport News, has been turned over perma- 
nently to the Coast Artillery Corps and is now the headquar- 
ters for the Coast Artillery Railway Brigade. Fortunately the 
railway units nearest completion on the day of the armistice 
were those best suited for use along the seacoast. 

The project to build railway artillery, it should be under- 
stood, was one of producing mounts for guns most of which 
were already in existence. These guns came principally from 
the fixed mounts in the coastal defenses, but some of them 
from the Navy and other sources. The guns ranged in size 
from the 7-inch rifles, procured from the Navy, to 16-inch 
howitzers, one of which had been built experimentally by the 
Ordnance Department before 1917. Two or three of the rail- 
way projects — such as that of the 7-inch navy guns and that of 
the three 12-inch guns originally manufactured for Chile, but 
commandeered at the gun plant by the United States — were 
complete on the day of the armistice. When the Ordnance 
Department faced the task of terminating the industry, there 
were eight incomplete projects in railway artillery. Two were 
canceled outright; in three others partial production after the 
armistice was permitted; and the final three were carried 
through completely. 



178 DEMOBILIZATION 

One of the projects completed after the armistice was that 
providing for railway mounts for forty-seven 8-inch, 35 cali- 
bers, seacoast rifles. The two contractors — the Morgan Engi- 
neering Company of Alliance, Ohio, and the Harrisburg 
Manufacturing & Boiler Company of Harrisburg, Pennsyl- 
vania — had built eighteen complete units, each consisting of 
a gun car and numerous accessory ammunition and repair cars, 
a whole train in itself, and had manufactured all the parts 
for the rest. These parts were ordered assembled. This purely 
American mount possesses the advantage of permitting the 
gun to fire at any angle, the mount revolving upon a barbette 
carriage, and the disadvantage that in traveling on narrow- 
gauge track (such as is being laid at isolated places along the 
coast) its gun must be transferred to a special gun car — a 
transfer, however, quickly effected by the machinery which 
the gun train itself carries. Seventy-seven ammunition cars 
for these guns, built as they were for operation in French rail- 
way trains and therefore useless in this country, were sold to 
the French Government for about $250,000, a price which 
covered every cent spent in their production. 

A second project completed after the armistice placed 
twelve 12-inch guns on French Batignolle railway mounts. 
This mount absorbs the gun recoil in an enormous hydropneu- 
matic recuperator, permitting rapid fire and the fastening of 
the gun car to the track to avoid any retrograde movement. 
(Several of the railway mounts slid backward and had to be 
restored to aim after each shot.) The 12-inch mount, however, 
permits only a small traverse swing to the gun, which, for 
correct aiming, has, therefore, to run upon curved tracks, or 
epis, as they are called. These mounts were built by the Marion 
Steam Shovel Company with machinery partly the property 
of the Government. At the completion of the work this 
machinery was shipped to the Watertown Arsenal. 

The final completed project was the mounting of ninety 
12-inch mortars (seacoast weapons) upon railway cars. The 
Morgan Engineering Company built a special plant costing 
$3,500,000 for this one job, providing mount-building capac- 



ARTILLERY 179 

ity twelve times that of the Watertown Arsenal before 1917 
— and that arsenal had been the Army's sole source of big- 
gun mounts. On November 11, 1918, this plant had manufac- 
tured all the parts for all ninety mounts, and the assembling 
of these mounts was therefore ordered. About 100 ammuni- 
tion cars of French design were sold to the French Govern- 
ment for about $350,000, thus returning most of the money 
put into them. The Alliance plant itself was too large and 
expensive to maintain as a stand-by plant ; and, after shipping 
most of the special-purpose machinery to the Watertown Ar- 
senal, the Ordnance Department disposed of the building to 
a private buyer.* 

The armistice cut short the joint Franco- American project 
to mount thirty-six American seacoast 10-inch guns upon the 
Schneider railway mount, a French design, America to produce 
the parts for the mounts and France to assemble them. Four 
complete sets of parts had been sent to France before the 
armistice. The contractors were three: the Harrisburg Manu- 
facturing & Boiler Company (mounts), the Pullman Car 
Company (trucks for the gun cars), and the American Car 
& Foundry Company (ammunition cars). The weapon is not 
ideal for coastal defense, because the mount allows no traverse 
aiming, and the car therefore must be used on curved track. 
The contractors were permitted to finish eighteen of these 
mounts in all. 

A gigantic piece of ordnance was the 16-inch howitzer 
mounted on a railway truck during the war. In a project to 
build sixty-one such weapons by the year 1920 the Govern- 
ment spent $6,000,000 on a special plant at the mill of the 
Mid vale Steel Company near Philadelphia. The whole project 
was abandoned after the armistice, but one building had been 
erected and the structural steel for the rest of the plant was 
on the ground. Meanwhile the toolmakers of the country were 
working on the vast projected manufacturing equipment for 

* This and other special artillery plants since sold to private buyers are 
regarded as military assets. In the event of another great war they would 
undoubtedly be used once more for the work their walls encompassed in 1918. 



1 8o DEMOBILIZATION 

this plant; and a small amount of this machinery was com- 
pleted after the armistice and sent to Watervliet and Water- 
town arsenals. 

The Neville Island Gun Plant was projected in 1918 as a 
source of supply for guns of the largest size for mounting 
upon railway cars. The plant, which was to cost $150,000,000, 
a sum which would have made it by far the largest gun plant 
in the world, was expected to manufacture over 450 guns of 
the biggest sizes during 1919 and 1920 — more railway guns 
than the Germans owned altogether. The enterprise, which 
was entirely abandoned after the armistice, cost the Govern- 
ment about $9,000,000. Every ordnance officer, however, be- 
lieves that the mere project, actively started, had its effect in 
ending the war by depressing the enemy morale. The war cost 
us about $50,000,000 a day. If, therefore, the Neville project 
shortened the war by as much as three days, it wrote off its 
entire estimated cost. 

The project, immature though it was when terminated, 
placed in the war reserves certain steel- working machinery of 
the heaviest sort. One 6,500-ton forging press, costing $500,- 
000, was completed and turned over to the Navy Department 
for installation in the navy gun-forging plant at Charleston, 
West Virginia. Certain costly shell-making machinery was 
completed after the armistice and either sold to private 
buyers (at favorable prices, as compared with what the Ord- 
nance Department could have obtained for the unfinished 
machines) or else stored at the Watertown Arsenal. 

Watertown has thus become the producing center for rail- 
way artillery of the future. The liquidation of war industry 
enormously expanded that institution. Before 1917 the gov- 
ernment investment in the Watertown Arsenal was less than 
$4,000,000. After the concentration there of the special- 
purpose gunmaking machinery acquired by the Government 
during the war, the arsenal was worth, at a conservative 
valuation, $20,000,000. 




Photo by Howard E. Coffin 

AMERICAN FIELD GUNS ON THE RHINE 




Photo by Howard E. Coffin 

AMERICAN GUN ON EHRENBREITSTEIN, COBLENZ 




Photo by Signal Corps 

DESTROYING CAPTURED GERMAN AMMUNITION 




Photo by Signal Corps 

A CAPTURED AMMUNITION DUMP 



CHAPTER XII 
AMMUNITION AND OTHER ORDNANCE 

THE armistice found in the United States an enormous 
industry devoted to the production of ammunition for 
the artillery. Including its powder-making plants and 
its plants for the production of the raw materials of powder, 
its scores of shell-making factories, and its loading establish- 
ments, this industry overshadowed, in money invested and 
operatives employed, even the artillery-manufacturing proj- 
ect. The demobilization of this vast enterprise, therefore, 
afforded the Ordnance Department one of its major problems 
after the armistice. 

The production of powders, both high-explosive and pro- 
pellant, in which about 70,000 persons were engaged at the 
time of the armistice, was terminated in a remarkably brief 
time. When the armistice was six weeks old all manufacture 
of high explosives on war contracts had ceased, and two weeks 
after that the last of the war-time propellant (smokeless) 
powder was made. This termination left on the hands of the 
Ordnance Department a considerable amount of special-pur- 
pose machinery which had little or no market value. This 
machinery was therefore retained and stored at various ar- 
senals, particularly at the Frankford and Picatinny arsenals, 
the permanent army ammunition production centers. 

For a while the Old Hickory Powder Plant at Nashville, 
Tennessee, — its daily capacity of 900,000 pounds of smokeless 
powder making it the largest powder factory in the world, — 
was retained as a stand-by plant, but later it was sold. The 
Nitro (West Virginia) Powder Plant, another government 
institution nearly as large as Old Hickory, was sold after the 
armistice, with the result that a new industrial city is devel- 



i82 DEMOBILIZATION 

oping on its site. The War Department's enormous ammonium 
nitrate plant at Perry ville, Maryland (ammonium nitrate 
being used in the manufacture of the widely used war explo- 
sive amatol), the equipment of which included several hun- 
dred model dwellings, was, after the armistice, turned over to 
the Public Health Service to be used as a hospital for ex- 
service men. The three government picric acid plants — at 
Little Rock, Arkansas, Grand Rapids, Michigan, and Savan- 
nah, Georgia — were sold. Briggs & Turivas, Chicago steel 
manufacturers, bought the plant built by the Government at 
Senter, Michigan, for the production of tetryl, an explosive 
used as the charge in boosters in high-explosive shell. The 
Ordnance Department also closed out and sold the facilities 
provided at Bound Brook, New Jersey, for the production of 
tetranitroaniline, another booster charge. 

In general, plants and machinery used in making powder 
could be used also to some extent to make the commodities of 
peaceful commerce, and therefore the Ordnance Department 
had little difficulty in disposing of these surplus facilities at 
good prices. The powder-making facilities created during the 
war by the DuPont Powder Company near Wilmington, for 
instance, almost at once after the armistice turned to the 
manufacture of dyestuffs. Another war powder plant, with 
practically the same machinery, is to-day producing artificial 
silk, a cellulose commodity similar in chemical composition to 
smokeless powder. A third is making celluloid and artificial 
ivory; a fourth, paper. 

Since trinitrotoluol (T. N. T.) was the most widely used 
of all war explosives, the Ordnance Department was forced 
to go into the production of the basic toluol itself as well as 
into the manufacture of its nitrated compound. One war 
source of toluol was coal gas, and to secure the chemical from 
this source the Ordnance Department set up stripping plants 
in the gas works of thirteen American cities. Nine of the gas 
companies bought this equipment after the armistice. The 
other four plants were sold on the market, the machinery even- 
tually finding its way into the new industry which is taking 



AMMUNITION AND OTHER ORDNANCE 183 

gasoline from natural gas. The Government sold out com- 
pletely its two T. N. T. plants, which were located respectively 
at Racine, Wisconsin, and Giant, California. 

One of the most notable enterprises in all the liquidation 
of war industry was that of closing up the war project for the 
fixation of atmospheric nitrogen and the placing of that under- 
taking upon a permanent peace footing. In order to conduct 
this enterprise intelligently the Secretary of War selected cer- 
tain scientists and men of business experience to study every 
phase of the subject of the military and commercial fixation 
of nitrogen and to recommend to the War Department what 
disposition to make of the war fixation plants. This board was 
known as the Fixed Nitrogen Administration. 

In 1916 the United States, almost entirely dependent upon 
foreign sources for its supply of commercial nitrogen, took the 
first step toward independence by appropriating $20,000,000 
for the work of developing a domestic fixation industry. With 
this money the Corps of Engineers began, about the time we de- 
clared war against Germany, the construction of a great dam 
to arrest the power of the Tennessee River at Muscle Shoals, 
Alabama. This project, including a hydroelectric power 
house, was set for completion in 1923. The head of water at 
Muscle Shoals is expected to provide from 100,000 to 200,- 
000 horsepower continuously, and during nine months of the 
year high water will produce a secondary power almost as 
great. 

Aware that this development would in all probability not 
come through in time to serve the war explosives program, 
soon after the declaration of war the Government entered 
upon an enormous project to fix atmospheric nitrogen with 
power developed from coal. Five fixation plants of this sort 
were from first to last authorized. Three of these were com- 
pletely built, and the other two were partially constructed 
before their projects were canceled. 

In the fall of 1917 the War Department began the con- 
struction of a nitrogen plant at Sheffield, Alabama, and in 
1918 completed it, at a cost of about $13,000,000. This plant 



i84 DEMOBILIZATION 

produced usable nitrogen in the form of ammonium nitrate, 
a product used with trinitrotoluol in the production of the im- 
portant shell-explosive amatol. It used the modified German 
Haber process, combining hydrogen and nitrogen to form 
ammonia, which is oxidized into nitric acid, which in turn is 
combined with ammonia to form ammonium nitrate. This 
plant produced its first ammonia in September, 1918, and its 
first ammonium nitrate on the second day of the armistice. The 
process, however, was never satisfactorily developed in this 
plant. 

The second fixation-plant project was inaugurated in the 
autumn of 1917 about the time the Interallied Ordnance 
Agreement put upon the United States the burden of pro- 
ducing most of the powder and explosives used by the Allies, 
thus tremendously increasing our need of nitrogen. It was no 
time to be experimenting with processes. The one fixation 
process of proved success known in the United States was the 
cyanamid process, used by the American Cyanamid Company 
at its plant at Niagara Falls. The Government therefore en- 
gaged this concern to build an enormous fixation plant at 
Muscle Shoals, a plant which was to use steam power until 
the hydroelectric power from the river should become avail- 
able. On the day of the armistice this plant, known as the 
No. 2 Nitrate Plant, was nearly complete: it turned out its 
first ammonium nitrate within two weeks thereafter. It cost 
$70,000,000 and had a capacity of 110,000 tons of ammo- 
nium nitrate a year. The test runs indicated that the plant 
could fix nitrogen at a cost commercially practicable. 

Two other plants, both to use the cyanamid process, were 
projected in 1918, and the Government began the construc- 
tion of both of them. One was at Toledo, Ohio, and the other 
at Cincinnati. Their combined capacity was to equal the capac- 
ity of the Muscle Shoals plant. At the armistice the construc- 
tion of these plants was well under way, but the Government 
terminated both projects, at a net cost of $12,000,000. 

The fifth plant was built by the Bureau of Mines for the 
Chemical Warfare Service at Saltville, Virginia. It used the 



AMMUNITION AND OTHER ORDNANCE 185 

Bucher process, producing fixed atmospheric nitrogen in the 
form of sodium cyanide, a chemical used in the manufacture 
of toxic war gases. It was about complete at the time of the 
armistice, having cost the Government $2,500,000. A test 
run indicated that the Bucher process was too costly to be 
practicable in normal times. 

The Fixed Nitrogen Administration, in its report, recom- 
mended that the Saltville plant be abandoned, but that the 
plant at Sheffield and the one at Muscle Shoals be retained 
permanently, the modified Haber process at the No. 1 Plant 
to be developed by further research. No. 2 Plant at Muscle 
Shoals was designated as the principal peace-time source of 
nitrates within the United States, and the report advised the 
United States to remain in the nitrates business as a commer- 
cial producer of fertilizer material, the Government to operate 
through a corporation similar to that which operates the 
Panama Railroad and its related steamship line. This report 
was based upon research which sent a commission of experts 
to Europe to study fixation processes there, and which even 
cultivated experimental farms in the United States to deter- 
mine by practical tests upon growing crops the fertilizing 
value of various forms of fixed atmospheric nitrogen. 

The armistice found dozens upon dozens of American fac- 
tories and machine shops, both large and small, engaged ex- 
clusively in producing the metallic shell used by the field 
artillery. This in itself was an industry of great size. The 
industry had not yet attained its production peak, but it was 
rapidly nearing that point; so nearly so that, during the taper- 
ing-off process, the factories working only eight hours of each 
twenty-four (as compared with the pre-armistice three-shift, 
twenty-four-hour day), the output was enormous. Take, as an 
example, the 75-millimeter size alone. In sixteen months be- 
fore the armistice the mills, working continuously twenty-four 
hours a day, produced about 10,000,000 forgings for 75- 
millimeter shell. The same mills after the armistice, working 
now only eight hours each day and tapering off their work as 



i86 DEMOBILIZATION 

rapidly as possible, in the two months before the wheels 
stopped, produced 5,000,000 additional forgings. 

The total production of the metallic elements of artillery 
shell, both before and after the armistice, recorded some totals 
of fantastic size. It should be remembered that for the most 
part our war shell were of the European nose-fuse type and 
therefore unlike any shell which the War Department had 
ever produced before. An apparently simple manufacturing 
proposition turned out to be a most difficult one, particularly 
in the production of two small but important elements of the 
nose-fuse shell, the booster, which accelerates the rate of 
explosion, and the adapter, which holds the booster in place. 
It was months before our manufacturers could produce 
boosters and adapters successfully, but then the effort came 
along with a rush. When production ceased the Ordnance 
Department had 26,000,000 boosters and adapters to dispose 
of. Other surpluses for salvage were 60,000,000 shell forg- 
ings, 60,000,000 shell machinings, 60,000,000 cannon car- 
tridge cases, nearly 70,000,000 metal parts for grenades, and 
over 6,000,000 metal parts for trench mortar shell. 

The demobilization policy was to store reserves of shell 
sufficient to meet the consumption of an army of 1,000,000 
men during six months of active field service. In the 75-milli- 
meter size, for instance, such a reserve meant 2,500,000 shell. 
Since we had produced 15,000,000 75-millimeter shell, it is 
evident that the Ordnance Department found on its hands 
12,500,000 such shell to be disposed of in some way. Surpluses 
in other sizes were also large. The steel strike of the autumn of 
1919 occurred opportunely for those disposing of the excess 
shell, for it enabled the surplus metal to be sold at good prices 
as melting scrap. A brisk demand for shell and cartridge cases 
as souvenirs also absorbed a surprisingly large quantity of the 
excess materials. 

As in the demobilization of the artillery industry, here in 
the shell-making industry we see at work the same prepared- 
ness policy of designating established arsenals and retained 
stand-by plants to be a manufacturing reserve against some 



AMMUNITION AND OTHER ORDNANCE 187 

future war emergency. Frankford and Picatinny arsenals were 
selected to inherit the shell-making facilities created in private 
plants during the war. At Frankford Arsenal was concentrated 
an equipment able to manufacture daily 6,000 shell, ranging 
from 75 millimeters to 240 millimeters. The Frankford shell 
plant was made a complete unit, capable of taking billet steel, 
forging out the shell blanks, machining them, and turning out 
shell ready for loading. At Picatinny Arsenal was created an 
experimental shell plant with a daily capacity of 300 shell of 
all sizes. 

As an addition to the two arsenals, but as a subsidiary to the 
Frankford Arsenal, the Ordnance Department retained the 
155-millimeter shell factory of the Symington- Anderson Com- 
pany at Chicago and equipped it as an enormous stand-by shell 
factory with facilities for producing simultaneously 155- 
millimeter and 240-millimeter shell. This plant has been 
named the Chicago Storage Depot. Here was concentrated 
most of the special-purpose shell-making machinery acquired 
by the Ordnance Department during the war. It consists to- 
day of two departments. The active manufacturing depart- 
ment exists in ordinary, all machinery ready for immediate 
operation. In the storage department exists special machinery 
with a capacity for producing nearly 70,000 shell daily. This 
machinery is catalogued and assembled in factory layouts, 
virtually complete except for the ordinary commercial ma- 
chinery used in the manufacturing processes, so that on short 
notice the Ordnance Department can ship from the depot 
shell-making units up to whatever capacity any future war 
contractor may wish to undertake. The installed equipment of 
the active manufacturing department has a daily capacity of 
12,000 shell. In 1917 the shell-making capacity of the United 
States was small, and it was a year before facilities could be 
created and production started on a quantity basis. The reserve 
industrial equipment to-day gives us a daily manufacturing 
capacity of nearly 90,000 shell, a sufficient supply for a field 
army of 1,000,000 men until a new shell-making industry can 
come into existence. 



i88 DEMOBILIZATION 

Powder and shell after manufacture went to the various 
sorts of loading plants, the propellant powder to be loaded 
into cartridge cases (for field guns of smaller calibers) or bags 
(for the bigger guns) and the high explosive to be poured or 
packed into the shell, boosters, or fuses. In carrying on this 
enterprise the Government either built or fostered the creation 
of seventeen great loading plants, eight of them — employing 
35,000 persons, most of whom were women — being owned 
entirely by the Government. These had cost from $5,000,000 
to $ 1 2,000,000 apiece. A few of these government institutions 
were retained by the War Department after the armistice. 
The shell-loading plant at Amatol, New Jersey, was added to 
the arsenal system under the name of the Amatol Arsenal, but 
the machinery was condemned for salvage. The Amatol Ar- 
senal is being used principally as a depot for the storage of 
reserve shell-loading machinery acquired during the war. A 
fire in October, 1918, destroyed the government shell-loading 
plant at Morgan, New Jersey, and a temporary storage depot 
was erected on the site. The two bag-loading plants at Wood- 
bury, New Jersey, and Seven Pines, Virginia, were disposed 
of after the armistice; but the third, at Tullytown, Pennsyl- 
vania, as the Tullytown Arsenal, was retained as an ammuni- 
tion storage depot. Four other shell-loading plants were re- 
tained as storage depots, and at these several points exist the 
great reserves of loaded ammunition and of ammunition com- 
ponents left by the war. 

Nearly all the loading machinery was concentrated at 
Amatol and Picatinny arsenals. At Picatinny also was set up 
an experimental plant for the development of processes in 
loading powder and explosives. This plant also contains 
machinery for loaded pyrotechnics in rockets, star shell, and 
signal-pistol cartridges. One piece of equipment is a dark 
tunnel in which the candle power of field illuminants can be 
tested. The plant includes facilities for loading grenades, fuses, 
and boosters. 

The American Expeditionary Forces after the armistice had 
on their hands some 65,000 tons of field ammunition, mostly 



AMMUNITION AND OTHER ORDNANCE 189 

of French manufacture, besides several thousand tons of Ger- 
man ammunition taken in the advance to the Rhine under the 
terms of the armistice agreement. At first it was thought that 
the French ammunition, shipped to the United States, would 
be a military asset for several years to come ; but as the months 
went on it became evident that, instead of being an asset, this 
ammunition was an embarrassment and a liability, and finally 
the War Department was glad enough to pay various foreign 
governments to take it off its hands. 

Gas shell, for instance, it was thought, could not be stored, 
because the contained chemicals would soon destroy the metal, 
and the shell would begin to leak their lethal contents. Later 
experience, however, showed that there was no sound basis for 
such an apprehension. In the advance through Belgium, Alsace- 
Lorraine, Luxemburg, and the German Rhine country, the 
American forces collected about 7,000 tons of German ammu- 
nition, none of which would fit our own guns and much of 
which consisted of gas shell. The gas shell could not be de- 
stroyed in dumps because of the danger to civilians in the 
neighborhood. The only safe method of destruction was to 
transport it to sea and sink it in deep water; but the A. E. F. 
had no labor to spare for this work, and, besides, the French 
Government refused to allow the gas shell to be shipped on 
the French railroads. Finally, for a price, the French them- 
selves undertook to dispose of this German gas ammunition. 

In Belgium we had 6,000 tons of captured German ammu- 
nition. The Belgians could not use it, forbade its destruction 
in dumps because these dumps were in territory which had not 
been devastated by the war, and would not permit it to be 
moved by rail to the devastated districts, because of the 
supposed danger from the gas shell. The A. E. F. therefore had 
6,000 tons of ammunition which it could not use, give away, 
destroy, or move. Finally, by agreeing to give the Belgians a 
large quantity of German engineering and construction mate- 
rial found in this area, the American authorities induced the 
Belgian Government to accept responsibility for this ammu- 
nition. 



1 90 DEMOBILIZATION 

The German ammunition found in Germany was sold to 
German contractors, and, under the eyes of American inspec- 
tors, changed into useful commercial products. 

As to the A. E. F.'s own 65,000 tons of loaded shell, it was 
decided to destroy all gas shell and all explosive shell and 
cartridges loaded with explosives of doubtful stability and to 
return the rest to the United States, The work of shipping the 
serviceable ammunition home actually started, but it went on 
slowly because of the lack both of labor and of ammunition 
ships. A fire destroyed one of the three collection dumps in the 
Chateau-Thierry area. As the ships repatriated the A. E. F. 
at a faster and faster rate, the various army areas were evacu- 
ated one by one, but it was necessary to leave guards behind 
at the various ammunition dumps. Then the War Department 
began studying the problem with a practical eye. Nearly all 
this ammunition was "war quality": good enough for rapid 
consumption on the field, but made hurriedly by inexperienced 
labor under conditions that made its permanent stability ques- 
tionable. It was found to be impossible to separate the better 
ammunition from that of doubtful stability. It was conceded 
that under ideal conditions this ammunition might be stored 
safely for five years. Some of it had already been stored for 
eighteen months; it would take at least a year to transport it 
all to the United States ; and therefore in this country it would 
be good for only a brief time. Accordingly the A. E. F. authori- 
ties negotiated with the French to assume liability for the 
ammunition, and it all went into the general settlement of 
1919 with the French, but as an American liability reducing 
the financial liability of the French under the agreement. 

The chief permanent benefits accruing to the United States 
from its extensive war industry engaged in the manufacture of 
instruments for sighting and controlling the fire of field guns 
were ( 1 ) a reserve of optical instruments of the most advanced 
types, some of which had previously been produced only by the 
French, (2) a large collection of machinery for making these 
and similar instruments, and (3) an optical glass industry 
more than sufficient to the normal needs of the country. Before 



AMMUNITION AND OTHER ORDNANCE 191 

1914 little, if any, optical glass had been produced in the 
United States. In demobilizing this industry, the Ordnance 
Department took care that all these military assets were 
properly fitted into the preparedness plan. 

Again we see at work the policy of centering future pro- 
duction in an arsenal. Frankford Arsenal was designated as 
the military center for fire-control instruments, and here were 
brought the reserves of materials and tools acquired by the 
Government in the course of the enterprise. 

The production of some of the artillery sights proved to be 
almost beyond the mechanical ability of American workmen. 
It took three skilled organizations to produce the panoramic 
sights. Warner & Swasey, of Cleveland, built these sights, but 
had to turn to the J. A. Brashear Company, of Pittsburg, for 
the optical-glass prisms to go into them. That company, in 
turn, did not have a skilled force large enough to correct the 
roof angles of all the prisms required. The Ordnance Depart- 
ment found a man who understood the correction of optical 
plane surfaces in the person of Dr. G. W. Ritchey of the Mt. 
Wilson Observatory, Pasadena, California. He trained a num- 
ber of men in this recondite craft, and they staffed an impor- 
tant department of the extensive optical shop which the Carne- 
gie Institution built at government expense at Pasadena. 

An extensive production of military optical instruments was 
permitted after the armistice and before the contracts were 
terminated. The work of producing some of these instruments 
was long and difficult, the instruments themselves would not 
deteriorate in storage, and the evolution and improvement of 
such instruments is slow. Moreover, the labor cost is by far 
the greatest cost in making optical instruments. The value of 
the unfinished components as scrap, even from an industry 
as large as that created in 1917-1918, with its eighty-three 
factories at work on contracts of a value of $50,000,000, was 
almost negligible. As a result of this permission to proceed, 
the industry reached its peak of production late in January, 
1919. The only contracts terminated were those under which 
no production had begun before the armistice, those the hold- 



192 DEMOBILIZATION 

ers of which asked for termination, and those which had 
already produced undue excesses of easily made articles. 

The largest producer of army optical instruments, the 
Bausch & Lomb Optical Company, of Rochester, held con- 
tracts amounting to more than $6,000,000 in value and pro- 
duced before the armistice materials worth over $3,000,000. 
The War Department obtained no machinery from this plant 
when the contracts were terminated, but it received and 
shipped to Frankford Arsenal large quantities of finished parts 
of instruments. The present optical shop at Frankford was 
largely equipped with machinery originally procured by the 
Recording & Computing Machines Company of Dayton. This 
company, which had never built optical instruments before 
the war, took contracts worth $4,000,000, built and equipped 
a complete optical plant, and became a producer, among other 
things developing a mechanical method of milling glass for 
prisms. Similar methods of demobilization were followed at 
all the war factories making sights and fire-control instru- 
ments: desirable machinery and unfinished components were 
collected at Frankford Arsenal, and the excess materials were 
sold. This plan put thousands of instruments into the war 
reserves, enough of some sorts to maintain the military estab- 
lishment for years to come. Of certain important classes of 
instruments the quantities obtained from the war industry are 
deficient. 

Between the year 1914, when war broke out, shutting off 
the export of optical glass from Germany, and 1917, when 
the United States went into the war, five American organiza- 
tions — the Bureau of Standards, the Pittsburg Plate Glass 
Company, Keuffel & Esser, the Spencer Lens Company, and 
Bausch & Lomb — developed the manufacture of optical glass 
on a small scale, but in quality the glass was not up to the 
European standard. In the spring of 1917, scientists of the 
Carnegie Institution of Washington stepped in to help the 
manufacturers with their glass problems, and complete co- 
operation all along the line resulted in a successful industry 
before many months had gone by. The four commercial pro- 



AMMUNITION AND OTHER ORDNANCE 193 

ducers eventually turned out optical glass more rapidly than 
both the Army and Navy could use it. Some of this glass was 
the equal of any ever made in Germany, and much of it, 
though of "war quality," was still good enough for many 
uses. The army ordnance contracts were entirely with Bausch 
& Lomb and the Pittsburg Plate Glass Company at its Char- 
leroi (Pennsylvania) plant. The production ot glass on the 
war contracts was terminated immediately after the armistice. 
A large quantity of glass not yet formed into sets of optics was 
stored at Frankford. The Pittsburg Plate Glass Company did 
not resume any production, but Bausch & Lomb continued to 
make optical glass for their own uses. 

Those who assume that, because we created an ample opti- 
cal glass industry during the war, the United States is to be 
forever free of dependence upon foreign sources of this com- 
modity, probably are too optimistic. There are numerous rea- 
sons why an optical glass industry is not likely to survive in 
the United States, at least on any large scale. The total normal 
American consumption of optical glass amounts to less than 
$1,000,000 a year — not enough to support many glass-making 
establishments. Secondly, nearly all the Allies developed war 
glass industries of their own, and the result is that the world 
has a large surplus of optical glass, which, if of good quality, 
does not deteriorate in storage. Thirdly, the war expansion of 
the world industry has created facilities above the present 
normal world requirements. In the fourth place, the industry 
is a precarious one, subject to heavy losses from carelessness 
or ineptitude in the mill. In the fifth, there is no tariff pro- 
tection for American glass, the law permitting the free impor- 
tation of precision optics for scientific purposes. Finally, there 
is a long-standing prejudice in favor of European-made scien- 
tific instruments, a prejudice against which an American in- 
dustry would have to fight. Three American producers, however, 
are said to be making optical glass for their trade. 

In anticipation of a possible collapse of the industry, the 
Bureau of Standards has brought to Washington the glass- 
making facilities which it set up in a special war plant at 



194 DEMOBILIZATION 

Pittsburg. This plant can make two tons of optical glass a 
month. It is to be operated by the Government with the view 
both of improving processes and of creating within the Gov- 
ernment an expert knowledge of this vital war industry. 

The United States carried further than any other nation 
in the war the substitution of mechanical power for the power 
of draft animals in the movement of field artillery. Nothing 
in our army equipment in France did the French, themselves 
the premier artillerists of the world, admire more than our 
motorization of artillery. The total contracts for ordnance 
vehicles represented an expenditure of $400,000,000. The 
program actually delivered 13,000 vehicles to the A. E. F., 
produced before the armistice an equal number ready for ship- 
ment abroad, and had 60,000 other vehicles under construc- 
tion when the halt came. The Maxwell-Chalmers plant at 
Detroit and the Reo plant at Lansing, working in cooperation, 
were producing 1,100 5-ton tractors a month, and this pro- 
duction represented the military power of 12,000 draft 
animals and 4,000 men. 

The demobilization of this industry was accomplished 
rapidly. Orders were cut to the bone, merely enough post- 
armistice production being allowed to enable the plants to 
dovetail their war business into the resumption of their com- 
mercial businesses. Since little special-purpose machinery was 
required in producing war tractors, the Ordnance Department 
created no manufacturing center after the armistice as a source 
of future supply. The war left the Army, however, with a 
number of engineers who had gained experience in adapting 
mechanical power to military uses in the field, and these men 
are continuing a development which, doubtless, will in time 
eliminate the horse from our artillery regiments. 

One of the innovations of the war was the motor-driven 
mobile repair shop for repairing artillery in the field. Each 
shop consisted of two sections, with fifteen trucks and four- 
teen trailers in each section — nearly sixty vehicles to the entire 
shop. On the trailers were installed the heavy machine tools, 
and one trailer of each section was equipped with an electric 



AMMUNITION AND OTHER ORDNANCE 195 

generator for light and power. When the shop was set up for 
business it presented the spectacle of two rings of vehicles 
ranged around the two power plants and hooked up with 
electric cables. The manufacturing program, both before and 
after the armistice, produced sixteen such shops, consisting of 
600 vehicles. Six of these shops have been stored; ten are in 
use by the permanent establishments. In addition, in terminat- 
ing the contracts the Ordnance Department came into pos- 
session of the unassembled but finished components of eight 
additional shops. Thousands of jigs, fixtures, and small tools 
used in this manufacturing project have been stored away and 
catalogued. 

Tank production was drastically curtailed immediately 
after the armistice. The tank contracts involved the expendi- 
ture of $175,000,000, The total production of 6-ton Renault 
tanks was limited to 950, of which sixty-four were produced 
before the armistice. The contracts with the Ford Motor Com- 
pany to build 15,000 3-ton tanks were terminated at once 
after the armistice, production being limited to the fifteen trial 
machines produced before November 11, 1918. Of the great 
36-ton tanks, Anglo-American design, the Ordnance Depart- 
ment built 100 at Rock Island Arsenal after the armistice, 
procuring from the British for the purpose the hulls and guns. 
The tank assembly plant at Chateauroux, France, went to the 
French Government in the general settlement of 1919 and is 
now being used as a car repair shop. 

No considerations of future reserves of finished materials 
affected the demobilization of the extensive war industry 
which was manufacturing our rifles, machine guns, pistols, and 
the ammunition for them. The production of these articles had 
been so successful that the moment the war ended the sup- 
plies on hand were sufficient for the permanent Army for 
years to come, with reserve supplies heavy enough to arm a 
large field force. The interests of the Army, considered alone, 
therefore, demanded the immediate cessation after the armi- 
stice of all this manufacture; but economic considerations and 
the dictates of good business practice made it expedient to 



1 96 DEMOBILIZATION 

taper off this production gradually, even at the cost of pro- 
ducing more materials than the War Department could 
possibly use. 

Special problems arose in the liquidation of this great indus- 
try. In the first place, the factories which made rifles and 
machine guns were sharply specialized for just this work, 
making it difficult for them to turn to any commercial pro- 
duction with the same equipment. Several of these plants were 
specially created for the war work, and therefore had no pre- 
war occupation to which they could turn. It was necessary for 
them either to close out entirely (as the Eddystone rifle plant 
of the Midvale Steel & Ordnance Company near Philadelphia 
actually did do) or to develop some new product. Two of the 
small-arms plants after the armistice added departments for 
the manufacture of ball bearings, one went into the production 
of automobile accessories and sporting arms, and a fourth 
(which had made bayonets) took up the manufacture of 
cutlery. It was necessary to give these concerns time to work 
out these conversions, if an acute problem in unemployment 
were to be avoided. 

The sharp centralization of the small-arms industry in the 
East was another factor which influenced the Government to 
permit an unwelcome production after the armistice. Most of 
the rifles, for instance, were manufactured within a small area 
in the state of Connecticut. The Winchester plant at New 
Haven employed 20,000 operatives, the Remington plant at 
Bridgeport 12,000, and there were several others of this size. 
To close them all up forthwith would have created a bad 
industrial situation in this busy and prosperous section of New 
England. 

The policy adopted, therefore, was to taper off the pro- 
duction of such materials. Upon the signing of the armistice 
ten American plants were engaged exclusively in the produc- 
tion of automatic arms. They employed 20,000 persons. They 
had reached a daily output of more than 1 , 1 00 machine guns 
and automatic rifles on contracts calling for the delivery of 
650,000 such weapons, at a projected cost of $193,000,000, 



AMMUNITION AND OTHER ORDNANCE 197 

of which 465,000 guns were as yet undelivered. The final can- 
cellations stopped the production of 382,000 guns, making the 
total war production 268,000 guns. In the various plants the 
Government had invested $11,000,000 in machinery. 

By January 15, 1919, the rate of producing machine guns 
had been cut in two. By June 28, all production of machine 
guns had stopped. The Springfield and Rock Island arsenals, 
always the Army's development and manufacturing centers 
for small arms, were selected to receive the reserve manufac- 
turing equipment acquired by the Ordnance Department in 
the prosecution of the machine-gun project. One unit of 
machinery sufficient for the daily manufacture of 100 Brown- 
ing heavy machine guns, and another unit for the daily manu- 
facture of 200 Browning automatic rifles were stored at Rock 
Island Arsenal. This reserve machinery was worth about 
$4,275,000. 

Similar measures were taken in the demobilization of the 
war rifle industry. Production was curtailed gradually, ceasing 
entirely in March, 1919. Three great private plants and two 
government factories (Springfield Armory and Rock Island 
Arsenal) built our war rifles. The War Department invested 
over $22,000,000 in machinery. With this machinery the 
rifle-making departments of the Springfield Armory and the 
Rock Island Arsenal were practically reequipped to produce 
the Model of 1903 (Springfield) rifle. The Springfield Armory 
(the chief future manufacturing center for this arm) was 
equipped to make 1,000 of these rifles in an 8-hour day, and 
Rock Island, 600. Working at full speed, both centers can pro- 
duce 3,500 Springfield rifles every twenty-four hours. In addi- 
tion special small tools, jigs, and fixtures sufficient for the 
production of 1,000 Model of 1917 (Enfield) rifles daily were 
stored at the Springfield Armory, and a unit of manufacturing 
equipment for producing 500 automatic pistols daily was also 
stored at Springfield. 

Four-fifths of the outstanding orders for 5,250,000,000 
rounds of rifle and pistol cartridges were terminated after the 
armistice. The policy adopted was to permit the small-arms 



198 DEMOBILIZATION 

ammunition factories to operate until September 1, 1919, if 
they so elected; but their production in that time could not 
exceed a quantity equal to what they might have produced if 
they had operated twenty-four hours a day from the armistice 
to February 1, 1919. This policy enabled the factories to dis- 
pense with their war labor slowly. About 1,600,000,000 
rounds of small-arms ammunition were stored as a future re- 
serve. The War Department had purchased machinery with a 
total producing capacity of about 3,000,000 rounds of ammu- 
nition in an 8-hour day. All the single-purpose special ma- 
chinery and all special tools, jigs, and fixtures were retained, 
and with them the Frankford Arsenal was built up as a great 
center for the manufacture of small-arms ammunition. Before 
1917 the annual productive capacity of the arsenal was not 
more than 100,000,000 rounds of rifle and pistol ammunition. 
The Ordnance Department has increased this capacity to 
750,000 rounds in an 8-hour day. Immense quantities of 
bandoleers, cartridge clips, cartridge cases, metal, and other 
ammunition components acquired in the liquidation have been 
stored for future use. 



CHAPTER XIII 
AIRCRAFT 

NEXT to the manufacture of ordnance, the production 
of airplanes and balloons and their accessories was the 
largest war enterprise of American industry. A hun- 
dred thousand workmen toiled in the aircraft factories, the 
business of which was represented by over 5,000 war contracts 
with a face value of several hundred million dollars. For the 
airplanes themselves, the contracts involved the War Depart- 
ment in the sum of $196,000,000, but this branch of the in- 
dustry was but a small part of the entire air program. Merely 
for motor trucks the Air Service entered upon commitments 
reaching a value of $45,000,000. The investment in flying 
fields, balloon schools, and other physical installations erected 
during the war in the United States was, on November 11, 
1918, approximately $75,000,000. Nearly 20,000 men had 
been trained to fly, and the Air Service numbered all its officers 
and men at 175,000 — an organization larger than the regular 
army establishment in 1916. On Armistice Day the Air Service 
had spent $43,000,000 in the production of spruce for our own 
airplane factories and those of the Allies. For this investment 
it had to show a great logging equipment, including sawmills, 
three railroad systems (with 130 miles of trackage), hotels, 
and the housing for thousands of woodsmen. It was heavily in- 
volved also in plans for the production of other raw materials 
used in the manufacture of airplanes — $30,000,000 invested 
or obligated in the development of a chain of chemical plants 
for producing "dope," the varnish that stretches and water- 
proofs the fabric of airplane wings; and $8,000,000 tied up in 
the fabric itself or in raw cotton for weaving into fabric. The 
Service spent over $25,000,000 for gasoline and oil. The 



200 DEMOBILIZATION 

largest enterprise of all was the production of airplane engines, 
the contracts for which reached a total value of $450,000,000. 

These figures are cited to show the enormous size of our air 
project, to show, also, how small a part of a balanced air pro- 
gram is the manufacture of the airplanes themselves, and, 
finally, to controvert and refute the widespread, the almost 
universal, impression to-day that the whole air program of 
America in the war was a failure, a scandal, and a blot on the 
fair name of our war industry. 

The average American, if he has not examined the record 
of our war aircraft program, probably holds the opinion that 
a billion dollars or more appropriated for aircraft vanished into 
thin air during the war, and that all we had to show for the 
enormous expenditure was a few hundred airplanes of inferior 
design. To this day such statements are still being made by 
irresponsible journalists and other careless critics of the con- 
duct of the war. Against such assertions we oppose the state- 
ment that the production of aeronautical materials during the 
war was as successful as any other great branch of war in- 
dustry, that we got value received for our money — "war 
value," that is — and that the losses incurred were the natural 
and inevitable losses to be expected by any nation unprepared 
for war. The general charge of shocking waste and failure re- 
poses upon nothing more substantial than rumor and muddy 
impression. Behind the rejoinder we are able to marshal the 
facts, which are, with the demobilization of the industry vir- 
tually complete, now to be evaluated as a whole. 

In the first place, how much money did we actually spend 
in the prosecution of the great aircraft program? A billion and 
a half? A billion'? Not at all. The war appropriations for the 
air were widely advertised ; the acts of Congress covering back 
into the Treasury the unexpended balances, the transfers of air 
service funds to other purposes, and the recoveries and reim- 
bursements from the sales of surplus materials were not so 
well advertised. The well-advertised appropriations came to a 
total of $1,691,854,758. But the greater part of these appro- 
priations was made when the Air Service was a branch of the 




Photo from Packard Motor Car Co. 

PREPARING LIBERTY ENGINES FOR STORAGE 




Photo by Signal Corps 

ASSEMBLING PLANT AT ROMORANTIN 




Signal Corps Photo from drawing by J. Andre Smith 

FLYING FIELD AT ISSOUDUN 




Signal Corps Photo from drawing by J. Andre Smith 

LAME DUCKS 



AIRCRAFT 201 

Signal Corps, and a considerable sum went for the procurement 
of signaling materials not connected with aircraft at all. More- 
over, when the armistice came, several hundred million dollars 
of these authorizations were as yet untouched by those procur- 
ing the aircraft, and Congress revoked all such appropriations. 
When the subtractions are made on account of the Signal 
Corps' proper business and on account of revoked appropria- 
tions, we find that the net appropriation on account of the air 
program was $1,158,070,773. 

But this vast sum is still far above the sum actually spent. 
On the day of the armistice there were great unexpended bal- 
ances in practically all the appropriations granted to the Air 
Service, and these balances remained great after the liquidation 
of the industry. Since the unexpended balances eventually will 
be recovered into the general funds of the Treasury, it is proper 
to subtract them here ; and by making the subtraction, we find 
that the war expenditure for the aircraft program was approxi- 
mately $868,000,000. Yet even this was not net expenditure. 
From this amount there is still to be subtracted the millions 
received from the sale and transfer of surplus materials, the 
reimbursements on account of overpayments to contractors, 
and other items. The full subtraction of these credits leaves us 
with a net war expenditure for aircraft of approximately 
$720,000,000. 

This figure, indeed, is an estimate ; but it is a close estimate. 
It is an estimate because, at the time this is written (July, 
1921), the liquidation of the war aircraft industry is not yet 
quite complete. Four contractors' claims are still unsettled, and 
surplus worth less than $18,000,000 remains unsold. There- 
fore, even if the estimated cost of settling the claims and the 
estimated recovery from the sale of surplus are grossly in- 
accurate, such errors cannot greatly affect the total estimate. 
The last official financial statement on the war business of the 
Air Service, dated April 23, 1921, showed that the jiet cost 
then was $738,133,972.28, leaving in the Treasury at that 
time an unexpended balance of $419,936,801.20, and this 
cost was still to be reduced by recoveries from the sale of 



202 DEMOBILIZATION 

surplus and by reimbursements of overpayments made to con- 
tractors in the settlements. 

Thus we have, as the cost of the war air program, the figure 
$720,000,000 — not half the billion and a half alleged by the 
critics to have been wasted. But what happened to the $720,- 
000,000^ Was it wasted^ What did we get for it"? The 
answers to these questions may be a revelation to those who 
have accepted the common misstatement that the whole project 
ended in a colossal failure. 

First, airplanes. For the money spent the Army received, 
not a few hundred airplanes, but approximately 19,000. When 
the money was appropriated, those in charge of the air pro- 
gram, and the public, too, expected these funds to produce 
airplanes in numbers sufficient to darken the skies. Well, here 
was the sky-darkening cloud of them — 19,000 planes, pro- 
duced and delivered to the Army. And at least half this number 
consisted of "service" planes, as distinguished from training 
machines. The average value of an airplane without engine 
may be conservatively placed at $6,000. Thus, the planes de- 
livered on the war orders were worth $114,000,000, a sum 
which accounts for nearly one-sixth of the total war expendi- 
ture made by the Air Service. In round numbers, the American 
industry produced 12,000 of these planes before the armistice, 
and afterwards, during the termination of the work, completed 
production on 1,500 that were unfinished. The remaining 5,500 
were purchased from the French, British, and Italian indus- 
tries. Those who criticize the administration of this branch of 
our war industry commonly lose sight of the fact that all the 
foreign airplanes procured by us were bought with the funds 
appropriated for the Air Service. 

Planes, however, are a small item compared with some of 
the other materials procured with the $720,000,000. The 
American industry produced 30,000 aviation engines before 
the armistice and more than 11,000 afterwards on war orders 
during the termination of the industry — the exact figure, 
representing the total war production, being 41,590. Of these, 
20,478 were Liberty engines, 15,572 of which were produced 



AIRCRAFT 203 

before November 30, 1918. The Liberty engines alone repre- 
sented over 8,000,000 horsepower. In addition, from the 
$720,000,000 spent, we bought several thousand aviation en- 
gines in Europe. In all we received approximately 45,000 
engines for our money. At $6,000 apiece — a fair average price 
— this procurement accounted for $270,000,000 of the money. 
Planes and engines together accounted for $384,000,000, or 
more than half the total expenditure. 

This was all value received. But we have still to consider 
many important items of expense necessary to the prosecution 
of an air project such as ours was. It took, for instance, $190,- 
000,000 to maintain the Air Service of the American Expe- 
ditionary Forces. The appropriation procured 1,100 balloons 
both before and after the armistice, at a cost, say, of $1 1,000,- 
000. As we have noted above, $75,000,000 went into buildings 
for the Air Service in this country, another great sum into 
motor trucks, still another into fuel and lubricating oils, and 
upwards of $80,000,000 into the development of raw ma- 
terials for airplane manufacture — spruce, dope, and fabric. 
This last was a necessary and justifiable expenditure, in that 
it sustained the airplane industry, not only of the United 
States, but of the principal Allies as well. Too, the develop- 
ment of raw materials was on a scale which anticipated great 
expansion of the manufacture of airplanes in 1919 and 1920. 
And so we can go, item by item, through the list of sub-enter- 
prises in the aviation project and find that we received great 
value for our money and that almost the only wastes were the 
to-be-expected war wastes, largely due to our unpreparedness 
for war. These wastes were represented in the high prices paid 
for materials produced in such a hurry on such a scale. These 
high unit prices, of course, took care of the cost of creating 
almost the whole manufacturing equipment of the industry. 
However, we secured the materials. 

We may pause here, too, to correct another misapprehension 
which has had some currency: namely, that not only was a 
billion shamefully wasted on aircraft but it was wasted by the 
so-called doUar-a-year men called to Washington and placed 



204 DEMOBILIZATION 

in charge of the aircraft program. The only doUar-a-year men 
connected with that program in a conspicuous capacity were 
the civilian members of the Aircraft Board — Mr. Howard E. 
Coffin, chairman, and Messrs. Richard F. Howe and Harry B. 
Thayer, the other two members. But the Aircraft Board was 
advisory only in function and possessed absolutely no adminis- 
trative or executive powers. It acted as a clearing house in the 
effort to coordinate the aircraft production of the War and 
Navy departments. The actual work of procuring aircraft — 
designing, contracting for, inspecting, and receiving materials 
— was always in the hands of the uniformed services. The Air- 
craft Board had no control of the spending of appropriations, 
except that of the relatively insignificant appropriation of 
$100,000 granted to it by Congress to cover its office expenses. 

The industry which wrote the records of aircraft produc- 
tion was attaining great momentum when the armistice was 
signed, although it had not yet reached capacity production. 
It had, however, in the final thirty-one days of active hostili- 
ties, produced 1,582 airplanes (1,081 of which were De Havi- 
land service planes for use in France), 5,177 engines (of which 
3,034 were Liberty engines), and 249 kite balloons. The busi- 
ness of terminating this industry was difficult. The liquidation 
plan adopted was essentially like that used by the Ordnance 
Department. Before the armistice the production branch of the 
Air Service was organized into eight manufacturing districts, 
with headquarters respectively at Boston, Buffalo, Chicago, 
Dayton, Detroit, New York, Pittsburg, and San Francisco. 
Five thousand persons were employed by the district organiza- 
tions. After the armistice the district production boards became 
district claims boards for the Air Service, and they conducted 
most of the actual work of terminating production and arrang- 
ing settlements with the contractors. Their settlements went 
up for approval, first, to the Air Service Claims Board and, 
finally, to the War Department Claims Board. 

The air service contracts outstanding on the first day of the 
armistice obligated the Government to accept completed ma- 
terials to the value of $767,423,308.50. Completed materials 



AIRCRAFT 205 

and raw and semi-finished materials accepted by the Govern- 
ment in the settlement with the contractors after the armistice 
reached a value of $259,733,874.30. Thus the contracts and 
parts of contracts terminated in the liquidation accounted for 
a cancellation of work to the value of $509,689,434.20. In 
addition to accepting and paying for the materials, the Govern- 
ment paid in cash to the producers in settlement of their claims 
the sum of $94,013,776.51. Hundreds of contractors accepted 
the statutory $1.00 and relieved the Government of all finan- 
cial obligation. 

For the sole or leading purpose of creating reserves for 
future use by the Army, there was little or no production of 
air supplies after the armistice. Leaving aside all questions of 
the obsolescence of design, no major class of military supplies 
is less durable in storage than aircraft materials. Like an egg, 
an airplane or a balloon cannot be slightly bad and still be 
usable. It must be 100-per-cent perfect, or it is dangerous. 
The life of rubber is short even under the most favorable condi- 
tions. The rubber in balloon fabric does not escape this swift 
impairment. The rubber tires of airplanes deteriorate with 
equal rapidity. The laminated and glued joints of the wooden 
wing beams of airplanes expand, contract, and work loose in the 
varying humidity of the surrounding air and are soon weak- 
ened below the safety point. Propellers are also highly sensi- 
tive to changes in humidity and temperature. Storage batteries, 
when stacked together in storage, wear out in a few months, 
each cell apparently working upon and adversely affecting its 
neighbors. Bolted wing cloth, when left folded, becomes weak 
along the creases. Of all aviation supplies, engines are the least 
susceptible to deterioration in storage. 

In view of these considerations, such production of aircraft 
and aviation supplies as was permitted after the armistice was 
undertaken almost solely in the interest of the contractors and 
their employees. Most of the factories were allowed to con- 
tinue in operation under war contracts only until they had used 
up materials in process of manufacture when the armistice was 
signed. Even this operation was conducted at a reduced rate. 



2o6 DEMOBILIZATION 

The airplane contracts had called for a delivery of 27,000 
planes in all. The production under these contracts, in exact 
figures, amounted to 11,754 planes before the armistice and 
1,732 afterwards, a total of 13,486 airplanes produced by the 
American factories. Contract terminations canceled the pro- 
duction of about an equal number. 

The post-armistice production of airplane engines was some- 
what greater, both proportionately and in numbers of units 
delivered. This was due partly to the greater momentum ac- 
quired by the engine project, partly to the fact that engines 
could be stored safely and would retain good military value 
for years to come, and partly to the necessity of keeping the 
engine makers at work while their factories were turning to 
normal production. The total American production of aviation 
engines on the war contracts was as follows: deliveries to 
October 31, 1918, 28,509; deliveries thereafter, 13,081; total 
war production, 41,590. Of these engines 20,493 were Liberty 
engines, of which about 5,000 were produced after the armi- 
stice. 

About 300 observation balloons were produced after the 
armistice before the manufacture could be terminated. 

In one important particular the policy adopted in the de- 
mobilization of the war aircraft industry was exactly the oppo- 
site of that used in demobilizing the ordnance industry. In 
working back to a peace footing, it was the policy of the Ord- 
nance Department to reserve complete manufacturing equip- 
ments and to set up stand-by plants for the manufacture of 
some of the most important materials in ordnance supply. On 
the other hand, in demobilizing the airplane industry it was the 
policy for the Government not to retain any manufacturing 
facilities whatsoever. There were strong strategic reasons be- 
hind both these policies. For field guns, for recuperators, for 
shell, and for other important ordnance, there is little or no 
normal commercial demand; and the only way the Ordnance 
Department could guarantee the future existence of facilities 
for producing these materials was to retain the equipment 
created during the war. But there is, or can be, some commer- 



AIRCRAFT 207 

cial demand for airplanes, and some day there will undoubt- 
edly be a great commercial demand for them. It is important 
to the military welfare of the United States that this country 
take a foremost place in the improvement of designs and in the 
production of flying machines for commercial use. Only 
through the development of a great independent aircraft in- 
dustry in this country can the Government be assured of the 
existence of facilities upon which it can rely to give this nation 
great power in the air. As conditions now are, the Government 
itself must be the chief customer of the airplane industry, and 
on the government orders the industry must live until com- 
mercial flying begins to develop on a scale comparable at least 
to the early development of railway transportation in the 
United States. If the Air Service were to have retained the war 
manufacturing facilities as government producing and stand- 
by plants, that act would have dealt a staggering blow to the 
infant commercial industry in the most uncertain period of its 
existence. 

Only one exception was made. During the war the Wright- 
Martin Aircraft Corporation developed a plant in Long Island 
City for the production of Hispano-Suiza engines. This plant 
was purchased by the War Department and is being retained 
as a stand-by plant under the name of the United States Aero- 
nautical Engine Plant. The future of this establishment, how- 
ever, is uncertain. 

Although it ruthlessly dispensed with the war manufactur- 
ing facilities, the Air Service retained in the demobilization a 
considerable part of the physical plant created for it during 
the war. Of the twenty-six flying fields used in the training of 
the war aviators, six have been retained as flying fields. These 
are the Boiling, Langley, Mather, and Kelly flying fields and 
the Carlstrom and March pilot training fields. The present 
equipment also includes three balloon schools, three balloon 
fields, one mechanics school (Chanute Field), one observation 
school, various stations for the defense of our island posses- 
sions and for the patrol of the Mexican border, nineteen sup- 
ply, storage, and repair depots, and various other stations. 



2o8 DEMOBILIZATION 

The storage of reserve supplies retained by the Air Service 
afforded some interesting problems, since nearly every class of 
supplies required special treatment in storage. Engines, for 
instance, were thoroughly covered inside and out with a heavy 
rust-preventing grease compound before being stored away in 
dry, cool concrete warehouses. Reserve balloons were dusted 
with talc, rolled carefully so as to put as little weight as possi- 
ble on creases and folds, enclosed in sealed rubber envelopes, 
packed in wooden chests, which were then sealed up so as to be 
practically waterproof and air-tight, and then stacked in dry 
rooms in which air at a medium temperature circulates con- 
stantly among the chests. Even so, no long life for the balloons 
is expected. Wing fabric, both cotton and linen, was unbolted, 
rolled upon cardboard tubes, wrapped in paper, and suspended 
on racks in rooms heated in winter. Aviators' fur and woolen 
clothing was stored in fly-proof and moth-proof tar-paper-lined 
rooms, the floors of which were thickly covered with naphtha- 
line. Fabric was stripped from airplane wings before storage in 
order to permit the free ventilation of the wood; glued joints 
were given an extra coat of varnish; all metal parts were 
painted with red lead or white lead ; and the wings were stored 
in racks designed to keep their edges straight. Thousands of 
propellers were stored at the aviation supply depot at Middle- 
town, Pennsylvania, in a room in which moisture sprayers 
maintain a constant humidity and a thermostat a constant 
temperature. 

The aircraft contractors' claims proved to be fairly easy to 
adjust except one, the so-called castor bean case. This proved 
to be one of the most vexing settlements which came before 
the War Department Claims Board. From its humble position 
as an unwelcome medicament of the nursery, castor oil jumped 
during the war to the eminence of being an indispensable lubri- 
cant for the rotary engines used in driving airplanes. The 
prospective demand in 1918 for castor oil far outstripped the 
world supply. We needed 6,000,000 gallons by July, 1919. 
The Air Service therefore took the unprecedented step of at- 
tempting to grow castor beans in America, although castor 



AIRCRAFT 209 

beans, in merchantable quantities, had never been grown here 
before. Still, in the Southern States we had the correct climate, 
and no obstacle seemed to stand in the way of a successful 
crop. 

Accordingly, through twenty-three prime contractors, the 
Air Service arranged with some 12,000 southern farmers to 
plant castor beans in 100,000 acres of land. Glittering pros- 
pects were held forth : thirty bushels an acre was only an aver- 
age yield, and the Government would pay handsomely for the 
beans. Thus castor beans won 100,000 acres of good American 
soil away from rice, cotton, and corn, even at the war prices 
of these commodities. About planting-time in 1918 all was 
ready — fields, husbandmen, and tools — all except seed. After 
all, the farmers had to have seed ; and to get seed the Govern- 
ment seized a cargo of castor beans from India, originally 
committed to a more sinister purpose. These beans the Gov- 
ernment distributed among the 12,000 prospective producers, 
who planted them; and then, as the cartoonist so aptly says, 
the fun began. 

Certain of the growers, like suburban gardeners, watched 
for bean shoots that never appeared. Some of these alien beans 
seemed to derive a sort of floral madness from the heady gulf 
loam and sent up veritable trunks twenty, thirty, and forty feet 
in air. But never a bean pod crowned such luxuriant growth. 
Whether because of the growers' lack of experience, unfavor- 
able climate, or, more likely, defective seed, there has seldom 
been an American crop failure more nearly total than this. By 
gleaning every bean, the producers managed to gather 181,000 
bushels, or 1 .8 bushels to the acre. 

As soon as the fell result was known, 12,000 angry farmers 
besieged the Government with demands for reparation. The 
claims aggregated millions. Not only did the farmers hold the 
Government responsible for the crop loss, but they also, dozens 
of them, put in claims for property damage and restoration 
costs, maintaining that in clearing their lands after the bean 
crop they had had to use stump pullers and dynamite to rout 
out the enormous stalks. One farmer sarcastically credited the 



210 DEMOBILIZATION 

War Department with his winter's supply of firewood, which 
he said he had been able to cut from his bean patch. The War 
Department finally settled the claims for a total of $1,540,- 
638, which was at the rate of $8.50 a bushel for the beans 
received. Thus ended the first lesson in the American cultiva- 
tion of the castor bean. It will be some time yet before the 
Department of Agriculture will have to create a branch to 
gather statistics on the domestic castor bean crop. 

The work of demobilizing the Air Service of the American 
Expeditionary Forces ramified into several main branches: 
the cancellation of our foreign contracts and the settlement of 
our accounts with the governments of the Allies arising from 
the mutual purchases of materials; the sale of the installations 
and surplus movable property acquired by the Service during 
the war; the salvaging of worn-out equipment; and the ship- 
ment to the United States of airplanes and other equipment 
retained by the Air Service for future use. Most of the surplus 
property of the Air Service abroad went to France in the bulk 
sale of all surplus A. E. F. property, although some was taken 
by other governments in Europe in smaller purchases. These 
sales were consummated by the United States Liquidation 
Commission, which also concluded the financial settlements of 
our air service accounts with the Allied governments. These 
transactions are to be explained in some detail in a later 
chapter. The disposition of all aircraft materials retained by 
the A. E. F. was accomplished by the Air Service itself. 

The A. E. F.'s production center before the armistice had 
been at the great flying field at Romorantin, near Tours. Here 
all new airplanes acquired by the A. E. F., either from the 
American industry or from the factories in Europe, had been 
received, assembled, equipped, and dispatched to the front. 
It had taken more than 10,000 officers and enlisted men to do 
this work. After the armistice Romorantin was made the con- 
centration depot for all American air service supplies in France, 
and here all materials for return to the United States were 
boxed and forwarded to the ports. About 1,000 airplane en- 
gines were shipped to the United States and 2,097 planes, of 



AIRCRAFT 211 

which 347 were German, 1,139 British and French, and 611 
American De Havilands. 

Merely the packing of this equipment was a work of great 
size. It required, for instance, 7,500,000 board feet of seasoned 
lumber for the crates, besides large quantities of nails, bolts, 
clamps, wire cable, paint, and roofing paper, and also tools for 
the packers. A lumber mill employing 195 operatives was set 
up merely to resaw, tongue, and groove the lumber for boxes 
and crates. 

The 2,000 airplanes returned to the United States repre- 
sented practically all of the great aerial equipment of the 
A. E. F. which was saved for use after the war. The sales of 
our used airplanes abroad after the armistice, to either govern- 
ments or individuals, were practically nothing. The remaining 
thousands of airplanes which had once borne the American 
insignia aloft were stripped of their salvageable materials and 
burned in great bonfires, the pyres of original investments 
running up into millions of dollars. This seeming profligacy 
was harshly criticized by those in this country who did not 
understand the conditions; but, when those responsible for 
the destruction had put in their defense, the criticism ceased. 

The life of airplanes in use or in storage is short at best. 
Thousands of the A. E. F. planes had given considerable serv- 
ice, either at the training fields or at the front. The average 
life expectancy of these ships was probably less than three 
months. There was no sale for them abroad — France already 
owned many more airplanes than she could possibly use up, 
and the attempts of the Air Service to sell used planes to indi- 
viduals ended in complete failure. To knock down these ma- 
chines, box them, subject them once more to the deteriorating 
effects of the salt humidity of a transatlantic voyage, and to 
reassemble them in the United States, would still further 
impair their condition and still further abbreviate their average 
life. There was also to be considered the expense of maintain- 
ing soldiers in France to protect this materiel for several 
months, the expense of preparing it for shipment, and finally, 
— the chief cost, — the expense of transporting it to the United 



2 1 2 DEMOBILIZATION 

States. The question was whether it was good business to spend 
all this money for the sake of returning to the United States 
materials which at best would have a useful life of only a few 
weeks, and which, because of the surpluses of new or little used 
airplanes already on hand, might never be used at all. The War 
Department did not hesitate in its answer. It ordered the sale 
or destruction of all A. E. F. airplanes of this class; and, since 
sale proved to be impossible, the order meant their destruction. 

Those in charge of the work, realizing that criticism would 
be likely to follow, proceeded most carefully. Only the newest, 
least used, and best conditioned planes were reserved for ship- 
ment home. The air squadrons with the Army of Occupation 
were given a plentiful supply of airplanes. The rest, destined 
for destruction, were given several inspections by different 
committees and boards of survey, in order that the Chief of 
the Air Service might have a plentitude of expert opinion on 
which to base his condemnation orders. 

The Class D material, as this condemned property was 
called, was concentrated in three centers — Romorantin, Issou- 
dun (where the A. E. F. had operated the largest flying school 
in the world), and Colombey-les-Belles (the demobilization 
depot for the zone of advance). Here were conducted the final 
inspections. Many of the condemned planes presented, to the 
unpracticed eye, a perfect appearance. Storage space in the zone 
of advance after the armistice had always been short, and these 
apparently good machines had suffered from exposure to the 
weather. They were water-soaked; glued joints had given 
away, wooden parts were warped, and so on. They would have 
had to be completely rebuilt to be safe. Others had broken 
struts and cross braces and other damaged parts. All such 
machines were set aside for salvage. 

The condemned airplanes then passed from crew to crew, 
who dismantled them. All miscellaneous metal parts were 
stripped out and sent to the quartermaster depots for sale as 
junk metal. Engines were removed and saved, as were also pro- 
pellers, landing gears, wheels, tires, axles, cowls, gas tanks and 
oil tanks, controls, instruments, radio apparatus, machine guns, 




Photo from Air Stii, 



AMERICAN AIRPLANE WRECKAGE 




Photo from Air Service 



FUEL FOR THE BONFIRE 




Photo by Signal Corps 

GERMAN LOCOMOTIVE TAKEN OVER BY A. E. F. ENGINEERS 




Photo by Signal Corps 

ENGINEERS CONSTRUCTING BEAUNE UNIVERSITY 



AIRCRAFT 213 

bomb racks, and many other serviceable articles. Even complete 
wings, when in good condition, were removed and packed for 
shipment to the United States, The remaining debris, consisting 
of little more than the highly inflammable wooden construction 
members and dope-covered wing fabric, was piled in great 
heaps and burned. More than 2,300 airplanes were thus dis- 
posed of. 

One hundred observation balloons were ripped up and used 
for tarpaulins, wagon covers, and the like. The rest of the 
A. E. F. balloons were returned to the United States. 

Airdromes on leased lands, occupied by small aviation units 
of the A. E. F., were turned back to the owners of the property 
after troops had dismantled all the war structures. With the 
exception of these, the entire plant equipment of the Air Serv- 
ice in France, consisting of training stations, observation 
schools, supply depots, and the like, was taken over by the 
French Government, The American surplus of aircraft in Eng- 
land was disposed of by the British Government, acting as 
agent for the United States. 



CHAPTER XIV 
TECHNICAL SUPPLIES 

THE demobilization problem of the Corps of Engineers 
was a two-branched one in that, while the Engineers 
had purchased heavily of supplies in the United States, 
they had used those supplies principally in France, where also 
they had placed contracts for the delivery of large quantities 
of engineering materials which it was not expedient to ship to 
the A, E. F. from the United States. When the armistice came, 
it found great engineering production projects well advanced 
both in this country and abroad, large surpluses of materials on 
hand on both sides of the ocean, and in France an enormous 
activity in the construction of buildings and other more or less 
permanently installed facilities for the expedition. In France 
the Engineer Corps was charged with the duty of building 
docks, port terminal facilities, storage depots, hospitals, bar- 
racks, railroads, and other equipment for the Army, as well as 
that of building roads and bridges, tunneling out mines, and 
stringing wire for the troops at the front. It was the job of the 
Engineers after the armistice to terminate this whole vast 
business, closing out the contracts, settling with the contractors, 
disposing of surplus supplies, and storing reserves for possible 
use by a future army of large size. 

At the time of the armistice the Engineers were engaged on 
more than 600 separate construction projects in France. The 
work on 246 of these was stopped immediately, and the only 
permitted post-armistice construction was that of facilities to 
be used during the demobilization of the A. E. F. These can- 
cellations accounted for a saving of $135,000,000. The can- 
cellations included projects for the construction of 450 miles of 
railroad. Contracts with French producers of engineering ma- 
terials were canceled to the value of $30,000,000. In settling 



TECHNICAL SUPPLIES 215 

with the contractors the Engineers followed the principle that 
the American Government would compensate the foreign 
producers for all losses sustained by them, but would pay no 
anticipated profits. Eventually the French contractors' claims 
were settled by the payment of less than $1,500,000. Purchase 
orders placed with French producers, calling for the delivery 
of materials worth about $13,000,000, were canceled and 
settled for less than $90,000, of which sum about $60,000 was 
paid for supplies accepted in the settlement. 

The Engineers in France found considerable constructive 
work to do after the armistice. There were camps to be built 
at the American ports of embarkation in France, nearly 10,000 
miles of roads to be repaired, and schools, theatres, and athletic 
fields, including the Pershing Stadium near Paris, to be con- 
structed. These, and the installations put in before the armi- 
stice, constituted for the A. E. F. a physical equipment on 
which the American Government had spent hundreds of mil- 
lions of dollars; yet after the return of the Expeditionary 
Forces, the physical installation in France, taken as a whole, 
was more of an embarrassment to the United States than an 
asset. Some of the railroads, docks, and other great pieces of 
construction work undoubtedly possessed great inherent future 
value to the French, and we could expect to be well paid for 
turning them over to the French Government ; but as an offset 
there were scores of installations of no peace-time value at all 
— roads, military railroads, and vast camps of flimsy construc- 
tion built upon fertile farm lands. The obligation was upon the 
A. E. F. to restore these occupied French lands to their original 
condition; but there were approximately 50,000 acres of 
French farms so occupied, and to have restored this land would 
have taken the time of 30,000 men for several years. 

The great reserves of engineering supplies in France, as con- 
trasted with permanent installations, were indeed an asset, but 
not so much of an asset as one would think. In the first place, 
to sell them to private buyers in the European markets would 
have been a work of several years, during which time the 
American Government would have had to maintain in France 



2i6 DEMOBILIZATION 

a force of perhaps 5,000 men. Moreover, all that time the 
engineering stores would have been constantly deteriorating, 
so that their average value would not have been nearly so 
great as their value at the time of the armistice. 

These were the considerations which led to the decision to 
dispose of all American engineering facilities in France, both 
supplies and permanent or semi-permanent installations, in 
one blanket, lump-sum deal with the French Government. The 
installations went to the French at a price difficult to fix 
exactly, because in this same bargain was included all other 
A. E. F. property not returned to the United States and not 
sold to other foreign countries, the French paying the flat price 
of $400,000,000 for the whole lot. It is estimated that the 
American army installations in France accounted for $32,000,- 
000 of the total sum paid. If we accept that figure, then we 
must call it a good bargain; for the French Government also 
assumed our obligations to the French property owners, thus 
relieving us of the work of restoring their farms to usable con- 
dition, ripping out the plumbing and other modern con- 
veniences with which we had profaned some of their most 
ancient chateaux and monasteries, and doing a thousand simi- 
lar tasks, or, in lieu of such work, paying to the owners the 
cost of the restoration in cash. 

The few engineering supplies accumulated by the Americans 
in England were sold to individual buyers. Enemy engineering 
materiel captured in France by the A. E. F. went to France 
in the lump-sum sale. In Belgium the captured materiel con- 
sisted principally of lumber and sawmill equipment, worth 
about $250,000, and this went to Belgium to pay that country 
for assuming the liability for the German ammunition cap- 
tured by our forces in Belgium. 

It was the policy, because of the scarcity of shipping, to 
return no heavy engineering supplies to the United States, but 
to bring back such light technical equipment as searchlights, 
flash-ranging and sound-ranging devices, instruments, and the 
like. It was, however, expedient to return large quantities of 
steel rails and beams, because these could serve as ballast in 



TECHNICAL SUPPLIES 217 

ships; and the Government also ordered the return of a large 
quantity of road-building machinery for the use of the Bureau 
of Public Roads. The Engineers saw to it that samples of most 
of the engineering equipment used by other armies in the 
World War were shipped to the United States for study here. 

The property bargain with France disposed of everything 
except two large claims against the United States : one for the 
American use of the French railroads, and the other for the 
damage wrought by the A. E. F.'s lumbering operations in the 
French forests. The railroad claim was most intricate and com- 
plicated because of the inaccuracy of the records and for other 
reasons, but it was finally settled in full by allowing the 
French Government a credit of about $61,000,000 (435,000,- 
000 francs valued at seven to the dollar). The forestry claim 
was settled by allowing the French a credit of $10,000,000. 

The claims of French contractors who had supplied us with 
engineering materials were settled, along with nearly all other 
French contractors' claims, by the United States Liquidation 
Commission in a blanket negotiation with the French Govern- 
ment. One engineering claim, however, remained unsettled. 
The contractor had agreed to supply 6,000 demountable bar- 
racks to the A. E. F., but he had delivered no buildings by the 
beginning of the armistice and had made little progress in his 
contract. Nevertheless, he presented a claim for damages 
amounting to $600,000. The Liquidation Commission offered 
him $1,200, and he refused it. His itemized costs included 
purchases of liquors, ladies' dressing tables, and oriental rugs, 
and he even admitted orally that one of his "costs" was a 
mysterious payment of $4,000 to a French interpreter in the 
office of the American engineer purchasing officer in France. 

On the first day of the armistice there were nearly 200,000 
tons of engineering war materials produced and on hand in 
the United States and awaiting shipment to France. This 
accumulation was worth $31,000,000. It included hundreds 
of locomotives, thousands of cars, and tens of thousands of 
tons of track materials, building materials, general machinery, 
and tools. Meanwhile the American contracts for the produc- 



2 18 DEMOBILIZATION 

tion of such supplies had reached a value of upwards of 
$365,000,000, and production had reached such rates as 300 
locomotives and 1,800 railway cars a month. This business was 
terminated with the utmost rapidity which was consistent with 
the manufacturer's need to convert his factory to other work 
without undue disturbance to his labor force, and with the 
Government's need to acquire adequate military reserves of 
such supplies and to realize most on the money which it had 
invested in the enterprise. 

When the war industry came to an end, the War Depart- 
ment thus found on its hands great quantities of engineering 
supplies. Some of these supplies, such as cranes and road-build- 
ing supplies, were turned over to other departments of the 
Government for use in public works. Up to May 15, 1920, 
engineering equipment and supplies had been sold on the 
market with a gross cash return of over $110,000,000. Since 
the cost of these materials had been about $128,000,000, the 
sales return was about 85 per cent of the cost, an extraor- 
dinarily high recovery rate. Foreign governments were heavy 
purchasers, particularly of railroad locomotives and cars. The 
Engineers reserved from sale and stored in various interior 
depots an immense reserve of supplies for possible future 
military use. The principal items in this reserve are as follows : 

*197 ConsoUdation-type locomotives. 

* 12,750 Cars, including gondolas, flat, box, tank, and dump cars. 

736 Track-miles of standard-gauge railway materials. 
353 Track-miles of light railway materials. 

35 Divisions of heavy ponton bridge equipment. 
6 Divisions of light ponton bridge equipment. 
f67 Divisions of unit equipment. 

81 60-inch open-type searchlight units (Cadillac trucks). 
154 36-inch barrel-type searchlight units (Mack trucks). 
1 Sound-ranging set. 

10 Bull-Tucker recording sets. 

25 Flash-ranging sets. 

35 Ground-ranging sets. 

* Includes surplus for sale. 

t Sufficient to equip engineer troops with army of 825,000 men. 



TECHNICAL SUPPLIES 219 

The financial liquidation of the American war business of 
the Engineers was unusually satisfactory, both because of the 
celerity with which it was carried out and because of the low 
cost of its termination to the Government. Shortly before the 
armistice many of the most important purchasing activities of 
the Engineers were transferred to the Director of Purchase, 
Storage, and Traffic, except that the Chief of Engineers con- 
tinued to buy railroad equipment and several other sorts of 
heavy materials and also searchlights and ranging apparatus. 
After the armistice the engineering contracts were consequently 
terminated and settled by two agencies — the Engineers them- 
selves and the Division of Purchase, Storage, and Traffic. The 
Engineer Claims Board was created to liquidate the war engi- 
neering industry for the Corps of Engineers, acting, however, 
as subsidiary to the War Department Claims Board. By May 
15, 1920, the Engineer Claims Board had settled up finally 
168 of its total of 171 war claims. These claims accounted for 
a total war business amounting to $238,000,000. Production 
after the armistice resulted in the delivery of supplies worth 
$17,000,000, which the War Department paid for at the 
contract prices. The terminations equaled $218,500,000 in 
amount, and for this termination the Government had to pay 
in cancellation costs only a little more than $1,850,000, or 
less than 1 per cent of the original obligation. 

The orders for engineering supplies taken over by the Di- 
rector of Purchase, Storage, and Traffic amounted to $138,- 
000,000. A considerable part of this production was allowed 
to go through to completion, and some of the business was 
transferred to other branches of the War Department for 
settlement. The Director of Purchase and Storage terminated 
entirely business amounting to $29,600,000 and paid in ter- 
mination charges $2,800,000 — about 9 per cent of the original 
obligation. 

One engineer contractor, a builder of locomotives, whose 
contracts were $55,000,000 in amount, canceled the entire 
business without cost to the Government. 



220 DEMOBILIZATION 

CHEMICAL WARFARE MATERIALS 

The armistice and the order to begin demobilization played 
havoc for a time with the Chemical Warfare Service, for the 
first assumption was that the use of poisonous gases in warfare 
had originated and been developed in, and would end with, 
the World War. On November 29, 1918, the Director of the 
Chemical Warfare Service received an official notice that "the 
amount of such [chemical warfare] equipment for the needs 
of the Army after the passing of the present emergency will be 
zero." The gas-mask production division of the Chemical War- 
fare Service was a highly organized and highly efficient body, 
and so rapidly did it work after the armistice that it succeeded 
in dismantling its gas-mask manufacturing plants and selling 
almost all the machinery before Congress blocked the plan 
and, with new legislation, made the Chemical Warfare Service 
a permanent branch of the regular military establishment. 
The gas production division of the Service, however, was not 
so precipitate, and it retained the facilities acquired during the 
war for the production of poison gases and chemicals. 

The Gas Defense Division, which produced the gas masks 
and other defensive equipment, largely did its own manufactur- 
ing; but it contracted extensively for the materials used in the 
manufacture. On the day of the armistice its outstanding con- 
tracts amounted to $5,000,000. By the end of the year 1918, 
or less than eight weeks later, these contracts had been reduced 
by terminations to about $150,000. The sales of surplus ma- 
terials brought in about $8,000,000. The termination of the 
production of gas masks at the two great plants on Long Island 
was guided entirely by the best interests of the thousands of 
employees, not one of whom was discharged until one of the 
official employment agencies had found a place for him in 
commercial life. In six months the demobilization of this 
branch of the Chemical Warfare Service was complete. 

So far as the employees were concerned, the demobilization 
of the gas-making industry was not a difficult problem. All the 
plants were owned by the Government, and most of the opera- 
tives were enlisted men in uniform. Moreover, for nearly a 



TECHNICAL SUPPLIES 221 

month before the armistice there had been almost a complete 
suspension of the manufacture of war gas, due to a shortage 
of shell to be filled with gas. 

The War Department's equipment for making gas consisted 
of the Edgewood Arsenal and a number of subsidiary plants 
located in various parts of the country. The Edgewood Arsenal 
was retained, at first in stand-by condition, with all machinery 
cleaned and oiled, all outdoor equipment housed in safe stor- 
age, and all surfaces subject to deterioration painted. The sub- 
sidiary plants, buildings, and equipment, were sold, princi- 
pally to manufacturers of chemicals and dyes. The sales were 
conducted by the auction method, and the Government re- 
ceived good prices. 

Even some of the experts in the Chemical Warfare Service 
accepted the common, but, as it proved, erroneous, opinion 
after the armistice that the great quantities of war gases accu- 
mulated by this nation and others during the war would be a 
dangerous menace as long as they were in storage, and that 
they would have to be destroyed, presumably by being dumped 
into the sea. These poisons were supposed to be so corrosive in 
their action that no metal containers would hold them long. 
Since large quantities of the war gases on hand after the armi- 
stice were loaded into steel shell, it was assumed that these 
shell and their contents would be a dead loss, except, perhaps, 
for some slight salvage value. 

Events after the armistice seemed to strengthen this impres- 
sion. Leakage, for instance, was undoubtedly occurring in the 
gas shell stored in our shell dumps in France ; and it was dan- 
gerous for unmasked men to work around some of these dumps. 
An even more convincing demonstration of the instability of 
loaded gas projectiles was given accidentally at Edgewood 
Arsenal after the armistice. Among the war stocks there de- 
clared surplus was one consignment of 500,000 hand grenades 
loaded with stannic chloride, a smoke-producing chemical. 
These had been returned from France, and they were un- 
doubtedly in poor condition. On the voyage from France the 
chemical had begun to eat holes through the metal of the 



222 DEMOBILIZATION 

grenades, and several thousand of the grenades had had to be 
thrown overboard. The Chemical Warfare Service sold these 
grenades to a chemical company. When a locomotive backed 
down to couple to the cars containing the grenades, the slight 
jar exploded fully half the missiles, and nobody could go near 
that sidetrack for two or three days. 

This incident apparently showed the impermanency of war 
gases. Actually it demonstrated the impermanency only of 
stannic chloride, which is highly corrosive to metal ; and stannic 
chloride, in the quantities produced, was a relatively unim- 
portant war chemical. Nevertheless, in the fear that other more 
highly toxic gases would also corrode and eat through their 
containers, the Chemical Warfare Service dumped into the 
ocean some twenty tons of phosgene and a large quantity of 
mustard-gas shell. This was probably sheer waste, as it proved, 
because subsequent experimentation established the fact that 
the most deadly of the war gases could be safely stored for 
years if all water moisture were driven from the chemicals 
themselves and all air exhausted from the containers, leaving 
only the pure chemicals in contact with the metal of the con- 
tainers. Corrosion was found to be due to the presence of 
moisture within the containers. 

Nearly 1,400 tons of phosgene, chlorpicrin, mustard, and 
other deadly gases made during the war are now stored at Edge- 
wood; and to-day, nearly three years after the armistice, their 
containers are still in almost perfect condition. It is estimated 
that they will not deteriorate in storage for at least ten years, 
a fact indicating that poison gases are as durable in storage as 
smokeless powder. There are also stored at Edgewood large 
quantities of loaded gas shell manufactured during the war. 
These are frequently inspected and tested, and the tests show 
that they are keeping well. The experts now estimate that 
loaded gas shell will exist in good condition as long as a battle- 
ship can give service, from the time of commissioning the ship 
to the time when it is declared obsolete. 

Other reserves of chemical warfare equipment now stored 
at Edgewood include 51,000 Livens projectors, 88 trench 



TECHNICAL SUPPLIES 223 

mortars, 3,000,000 unfilled gas shell, and 700,000 unfilled 
hand grenades. There are also in storage over 2,000,000 gas 
masks and 1,000 tons of activated charcoal for use as a gas 
absorbent in the mask canisters. The masks are stored in her- 
metically sealed boxes, a method of preservation which, it is 
hoped, will protect the rubberized fabric from deterioration for 
years to come. Other stored supplies include protective suits, 
protective ointment, and gas alarm devices. 

Such chemicals as the Chemical Warfare Service did sell 
after the armistice brought good prices. The prices of many 
chemicals went up after the armistice, and the Chemical War- 
fare Service profited accordingly. The Service made a profit 
of 100 per cent on the phosgene it sold and also found a good 
market for its chlorine. 

Among the reserves stored at Edgewood was a considerable 
quantity of the felt which was developed by Americans as a 
protection against arsenical smoke, a deadly chemical never 
given a trial in the field of battle, but regarded as an inevitable 
development in the expected campaign in 1919. The produc- 
tion of toxic smoke was one of the most interesting phases of 
the history of chemical warfare in the World War. The 
candles which projected this smoke were perhaps the most 
appalling weapon devised by any of the belligerents during the 
conflict, and the armistice interrupted an Anglo-American 
project, well under way, to asphyxiate the Germany Army 
with them in the spring of 1919. This development was one of 
the deepest military secrets both in England and the United 
States. Except for the French, not even the other Allies were 
admitted to the secret. 

The smoke candles employed an arsenical compound known 
as diphenolchlorarsine. In the laboratory this was not a new 
substance — in fact, none of the war gases actually used in the 
field was a new development; and of projected poisons, so far 
as is known, only the deadly Lewisite, the invention of Captain 
W. Lee Lewis in the Chemical Warfare Service's laboratory 
in Washington, was a new chemical creation evolved specifi- 



224 DEMOBILIZATION 

cally for use in war.* The other war gases had all been known 
to organic chemistry, some of them for many years. So with 
diphenolchlorarsine. It was first produced in Germany in the 
last century, and the Germans also originated its use as a 
military weapon. 

The Germans produced and used diphenolchlorarsine as a 
solid. The substance was put into glass bottles, which, in turn, 
were inserted in the T. N. T. filler of shell. The explosion pul- 
verized the chemical into a fog which had the advantage of 
being able to pass through the cotton baffles in the canister of 
an ordinary gas mask. This fog was highly irritating to the 
membrane of the nose and throat and caused sneezing, which 
prevented a soldier gassed with it from putting on his mask, 
so that he was left a victim to more lethal gases fired 
simultaneously. 

The British secured "dud" shell containing diphenol- 
chlorarsine and at once recognized this chemical as potentially 
much the most fatal substance yet brought out in chemical 
warfare. But it was evident that the German was not using 
it properly, in such a way as to release its full toxic effect. The 
question was how to atomize diphenolchlorarsine much more 
finely. British chemists and mechanical engineers eventually 
succeeded in producing the substance in candles which burned 
and cast out dense smoke. This smoke was diphenolchlorarsine 
so finely divided that the American gas mask, the most effective 
mask of all, was utterly powerless against it. The smoke 
particles passed freely through the baffles; and, since the par- 
ticles were minute solids and not true gas at all, they were 
unaffected by the gas-absorbing charcoal and lime of the mask 
canister. 

Every masked experimenter gassed by this smoke declared 
that a mask was worse than no protection at all. It is notable, 
too, that every one gassed, without knowing that he was merely 
reiterating what others before him had said, declared that, if 
he had not been able to escape quickly from the concentration, 
he would have shot himself rather than endure the agony 

* Chemical Warfare. By Fries and West ; the McGraw-Hill Company. 



TECHNICAL SUPPLIES 225 

longer. As to the persistence and diffusibility of the smoke, at 
one demonstration when two candles were burned in a deso- 
late spot in England, civilians were slightly gassed in a village 
several miles away. 

So much for the substance which outdid any of the horrors 
of the most horrible of all wars. But the weapon was useless 
unless protection against it could also be developed. America 
invented the protection — thick felt which was a textile tri- 
umph in that it absolutely caught and held the smoke particles, 
yet permitted fairly easy breathing through itself. The plan 
was to issue this felt in small pieces which the soldiers could 
wrap around their canisters, in order that all inhalation should 
be through the felt. The felt-wrapped canister would then be 
placed back in its knapsack. In the joint project, we were to 
produce the protective felt and the British the candles. The 
British had ordered several million of these and were actually 
producing them in large quantities at the time of the armistice. 
By that date the American mills were turning out the felt by 
thousands of yards, and our Chemical Warfare Service was 
also planning a factory in which to produce diphenol- 
chlorarsine candles. All this activity was an intense secret in 
both countries. The program was being directed at a certain 
week in the spring of 1919, when, at a favorable hour, the 
troops on our side having quietly been protected against the 
smoke, it was proposed to fire the candles everywhere along the 
front. The gas warfare organizations of Great Britain and 
America confidently expected that when that lethal infusion 
had disappeared, the German Army would practically have 
ceased to exist, and the war would be over. 

There is reason to believe that the German also realized the 
inefficiency of diphenolchlorarsine when fired in shell and had 
followed an independent line of development which led him 
to the production of candles. It is asserted that such candles 
were made in Germany before the armistice. It is doubtful, 
however, whether the German succeeded in developing a pro- 
tection against the smoke. 

After the armistice our Chemical Warfare Service continued 



226 DEMOBILIZATION 

an independent development of arsenical smoke. The problem 
was a mechanical one. The chemical is driven off as smoke by 
means of heat. If the heat is too great, the substance will bum 
and be changed into non-toxic compounds. If the heat is too 
mild, the smoke will not be thrown off efficiently. This problem 
we have solved. 

Mention should be made also of that other chemical secret 
of the war, Lewisite. In one sense Lewisite can be termed a 
development of mustard gas, for the laboratory process of 
making mustard suggested to Captain Lewis certain analogous 
chemical reactions, out of one of which came the hitherto 
unknown liquid which was named after him. Like mustard, 
Lewisite is a so-called vesicant, a substance which blisters the 
skin, but it is much more powerful; for, whereas mustard gas 
merely burns. Lewisite is absorbed through the skin into the 
system. Three drops of this chemical placed on the belly of a 
rat will kill the animal in two or three hours, and it is believed 
that this would be the effect of a similar quantity sprinkled on 
the skin of a man. Like mustard, too. Lewisite gives off fumes 
slowly, and these fumes have a burning, deadly effect. 

Before and since the armistice there have been other devel- 
opments of war gases in this country, and for some of these, as 
well as for some of the better known gases, there is, or can be, 
civilian use. Believing that chemical warfare has come to stay 
as long as there shall be wars, the Chemical Warfare Service 
has sought since the armistice to develop peace-time uses for 
war gases in order that there may be a continuous production of 
them, with a simultaneous training of chemists on whom the 
Government can rely in time of war. A new tear gas which has 
been developed is called chloracetophenone. The presence of 
a minute quantity of this gas in the air has a blinding lachry- 
matory effect upon the eyes of one caught in it; yet the gas 
is non-toxic. Various metropolitan police forces are experi- 
menting with this gas to determine its effect in dispersing mobs. 
Another distressing, but not dangerous, gas bears the stagger- 
ing chemical name of diphenylaminechlorarsine. It is tem- 
porarily blinding and causes nausea and vomiting, but it is not 



TECHNICAL SUPPLIES 227 

regarded as a lethal gas. It is proposed to use this in protecting 
vaults in which valuables are stored. Phosgene is used in 
making brilliant dyes, and it can also be used to exterminate 
rats. Chlorine is a widely used disinfectant. With other war 
gases it is proposed to exterminate numerous sorts of weevil 
and other insect pests which annually cause great damage to 
American crops.* 

SIGNAL SUPPLIES 

Signal corps contracts on the day of the armistice were 1,244 
in number. They contemplated a production of supplies worth 
upwards of $45,000,000. Telephones, telegraph equipment, 
radio, field glasses, photographic cameras, pigeons, wrist 
watches — these were the sorts of things the Signal Corps 
procured. 

The termination of this industry was guided almost solely 
by industrial conditions. With most signaling supplies it was 
impracticable to build up large war reserves. There is perhaps 
no branch of modern mechanical development to which applied 
science pays more attention than it does to perfecting the 
means of communication. Progress is rapid, and therefore any 
large reserves of supplies set aside by the Signal Corps were 
likely to become obsolete and without value after a few years. 
Moreover, although the war industry of the Signal Corps 
scored its greatest production records with such common things 
as telephone and telegraph instruments and wire, all this equip- 
ment was of special design unknown in ordinary commercial 
use and therefore without value to it. Consequently there was 
not the usual good business reason to continue production 
under the well-advanced signal corps contracts — namely, that 
a greater cash recovery could be obtained from the sale of 
finished products than from the junk sale of semi-finished 
materials. Finally, many of the signal corps supplies — and this 
applies particularly to radio — were heavily protected by valid 
patents. These patents the Government made free with during 

* Abridged from the discussion in Chemical Warfare. By Fries and West ; 
the McGraw-Hill Company. 



228 DEMOBILIZATION 

the war, but the existence of the patents virtually precluded 
the Government from selling its excess radio equipment after 
the war. For these and other reasons the signal corps war busi- 
ness was terminated at precisely the rate at which the manu- 
facturing equipment and its operatives could be diverted to 
other work. 

Unlike the Ordnance Department and the Air Service, the 
Signal Corps was not organized before the armistice by manu- 
facturing districts, but conducted all its business from the 
central office in Washington. The Washington headquarters, 
however, maintained intimate contact with the contractors 
through its so-called flying squadron, an organization of officers 
who visited the war factories, inspected their work, and co- 
operated with the producers in the solution of their shop 
problems. This same organization after the armistice con- 
ducted the field work of the industrial liquidation, acting 
under the direction of the Signal Corps Board of Contract 
Termination, which, in turn, was subsidiary to the War De- 
partment Claims Board. 

The new and unused materials acquired before the industry 
could be terminated were disposed of in various ways. Ade- 
quate war reserves of supplies were placed in safe storage. 
During the war the Signal Corps had built up a large training 
school at Camp Alfred Vail in New Jersey. This camp has 
been retained as a permanent adjunct to the Signal Corps. To 
the warehouses of Camp Vail were sent large quantities of 
surplus signal corps supplies, both finished articles and par- 
tially manufactured apparatus, there to be studied and de- 
veloped in the laboratories of the camp. The Post Office 
Department took a certain amount of radio telephone and tele- 
graph apparatus for use on its mail planes. The Forest Service 
took radio and also some of the homing pigeons for use in its 
fire-protection service in the national forests. Other supplies 
were sold to the public. 

The Signal Corps, as one of its duties, created and compiled 
a photographic history of America's participation in the World 
War, both in motion pictures and in "still" views. The hun- 



TECHNICAL SUPPLIES 229 

dreds of thousands of negatives in this history were collected 
in Washington after the armistice and stored in a specially 
constructed building which is not only fireproof, but which 
provides air of uniform temperature and dryness, to prevent 
rapid deterioration of the negatives. A complete catalogue of 
views was prepared, and the sale of duplicates to the public 
was authorized. Many of the illustrations in these volumes are 
taken from that collection. 

The disposal of surplus A. E. F. signaling equipment was 
notable in that it included a large sale to the French Govern- 
ment of equipment not embraced by the general bulk sale of 
1919. When the armistice came the A. E. F. was provided with 
hundreds of miles of main-line telephone and telegraph cables, 
hooking up a complete net of branch lines, wires, and ex- 
changes, all of it American-made and American-operated. The 
question was whether to rip it all out, after which it would be 
represented by some thousands of tons of junk, or to sell it 
intact as it was; and there was but one possible customer, the 
French Government, which monopolizes telegraph and tele- 
phone communication in France. Signal corps officers in France 
took up with the French Government, directly after the armi- 
stice, the question of the sale of these installations to France, 
and the negotiations were so well advanced in the spring of 
1919, when the United States Liquidation Commission (which 
conducted the blanket sale) arrived, that the signal corps sale 
was specifically exempted from the bulk sale. France paid 
$6,400,000 for the installations. France and England jointly 
paid $130,000 for the American cross-Channel cable, laid with 
great difficulty (and at an approximate cost of $238,000) 
between Cackmere, England, and Cap d'Antifer, France.* 
Negotiations were also under way for the purchase by the 
French Government of a large quantity of American wire- 
system construction material, but this was finally included in 
the supplies delivered under the terms of the bulk sale. Sales 
to other governments and to individuals were small. 

* Under the contract France and England must at any time lease this or 
some other cross-Channel cable to the United States upon the request of this 
country. 



230 DEMOBILIZATION 

MOTOR VEHICLES 
All of the A. E. F.'s surplus motor vehicles (a classification 
including bicycles and trailers as well as trucks, automobiles, 
motorcycles, and sidecars), as this surplus existed in August, 
1919, went to the French Government under the terms of the 
bulk sale. The sale value of these vehicles was estimated by 
our appraisers at $100,000,000, an estimate arrived at as fol- 
lows: the original purchase cost had been $310,000,000. 
Wear and tear, however, had reduced the usable value to the 
Army to $220,000,000. A second-hand machine, however, must 
be sold at a second-hand price, which will not represent the 
value of the machine to the owner disposing of it. A fair 
second-hand sale value of this equipment (assuming that the 
vehicles would be sold to private purchasers) was estimated at 
$132,000,000. But sale in bulk to the French Government 
relieved the United States of the cost of disposing of the 
vehicles in various sized lots to private purchasers. It was esti- 
mated that the overhead expense of selling the vehicles to indi- 
viduals would be approximately $32,000,000. As one item in 
this sales expense, it would require the services of 3,000 troops 
for one year to take care of the unsold vehicles. In that interval 
there would be a further depreciation in the value of the 
vehicles. Therefore, the A. E. F. was willing to throw off 
$32,000,000 and make to the French Government a flat price 
of $100,000,000 for the equipment. 

Before this sale, however, there had been sales to others, 
both governments and speculators. The Poles and some of the 
new Slavic nations bought nearly 3,000 vehicles from the 
A. E. F. American motor vehicles in England (they were not 
many) were sold at auction. The Italian Government bought 
about 200 trucks, ambulances, and motorcycles. As our troops 
were demobilized from the Army of Occupation in Germany, 
they left a surplus of over 14,000 motor vehicles. These were 
sold to a British syndicate for $25,000,000. Over 1,200 trucks 
of German make, acquired by the A. E. F. under the armistice 
terms, were sold to a German dealer. 

The war orders for motor vehicles (including bicycles and 




Photo from Engineer Depai tment 



AIR VIEW OF A. E. F. ORDNANCE DOCKS 




Photo by Air Service 



A GAS DEMONSTRATION 




Photo by Signal Corps 

MOTOR TRANSPORT IN FRANCE 




Photo by Signal Corps 

PART OF A. E. F.'S SURPLUS MOTOR EQUIPMENT 



TECHNICAL SUPPLIES 231 

trailers) of all sorts from American factories called for the 
production of 434,000 of them. Of this number approximately 
110,000 were bicycles and trailers, the rest being motor 
vehicles proper. The war industry had produced great num- 
bers of these vehicles before the armistice, 1 18,000 having been 
shipped to the A. E. F., while thousands of others were either 
in use by the Army within the United States or were awaiting 
shipment overseas on the day of the armistice. By the fourth 
day of the armistice, termination requests had stopped the pro- 
duction of 178,000 vehicles under the war orders. The rest 
were allowed to go through to completion. Adding to the re- 
serves on hand at the signing of the armistice the production 
after the armistice, we find that the results of the war industry 
were to provide the Army in this country with 138,000 motor 
vehicles, none of which had crossed the ocean. 

The continuation of production after the armistice was 
allowed for numerous reasons. A motor truck is an article 
readily salable at a good price. Its fabricated parts, however, 
have little value other than that of scrap metal. Moreover, to 
permit the completion of contracts saved the Government from 
the payment of cancellation charges. For example, as a result 
of these business considerations one order for 8,000 Standard 
B trucks, under which order production had started about 
November 1, 1918, was allowed to go through to completion. 
The Standard B truck was an assemblage of standard parts. 
Many factories made the parts, and a few, under contract with 
the Government, assembled the parts and turned out the com- 
pleted chassis. To have terminated the contracts would have 
left on the Government's hands a mass of parts of doubtful 
sales value and an obligation to pay heavy cancellation charges 
besides. The completed trucks could be sold for nearly all, if 
not all, the money the Government had put into them. The 
same was true of some of the other standardized trucks. 

Production was continued in some instances to place in the 
Army's hands certain sorts of trucks of which the Army was 
short even after the great production ending with the armistice. 
Finally, many of the truck factories were working exclusively 



232 DEMOBILIZATION 

on government contracts, and to have ended this work forth- 
with would have thrown tens of thousands of men out of work. 
It is notable, however, that two of the largest contractors, the 
Ford Motor Company and the Dodge Motor Company, both 
of Detroit, agreed to accept termination of all work uncom- 
pleted on November 16, 1918, at no cost to the Government 
except the cost of uncompleted materials which they would be 
unable to use in their commercial enterprises. 

The whole vast war business of building motor vehicles for 
the Army was terminated at a cost of $12,300,000 to the 
Government. As an offset to this cost, the Government took in 
materials worth $4,100,000, making the net cost of termina- 
tion about $8,200,000. 

MEDICAL SUPPLIES 

The armistice turned what had been an insufficient quantity 
of medical supplies for the expanding, fighting American Army 
into an enormous surplus for the demobilizing Army and the 
future permanent military establishment. The total purchases 
by the Medical Corps had reached a value of nearly $250,000,- 
000. Of these purchases, supplies to the value of about $11,- 
000,000 had been procured in Europe, principally in France. 
The supplies on hand on the day of the armistice and delivered 
on contract afterwards were worth $110,000,000. 

With the warehouses filled with hospital equipment, medi- 
cines, ambulances, and the other articles which the military 
surgeons used, the war industry producing these things was 
terminated expeditiously after the armistice. In the United 
States over 1,400 contracts and purchase orders, calling for the 
production of supplies worth $60,000,000, were terminated at 
a net cancellation cost of $3,000,000. Deliveries after the 
armistice from American factories gave to the Medical Corps 
supplies worth $32,000,000. In France and England the con- 
tract cancellations saved $3,500,000. These cancellations 
terminated, among other things, a project which would in 
time have delivered to the A. E. F. twenty-nine complete 
ambulance trains, each with sixteen coaches. Nineteen such 
trains had been delivered to the A. E. F. before the armistice. 



TECHNICAL SUPPLIES 233 

In the general bulk sale of A. E, F. property to the French 
Government went American medical supplies worth $34,000,- 
000. The Medical Corps turned over to the American Red 
Cross in France supplies worth $9,000,000 for use in the relief 
of the stricken populations of Europe. To other governments 
the A. E. F. sold medical supplies worth $6,000,000. The rest 
of the medical supplies in Europe were returned to the United 
States. In this country the surplus medical supplies were dis- 
tributed in various ways — to the Public Health Service, into 
the army reserves, and (by sale) to the public. 



CHAPTER XV 
QUARTERMASTER SUPPLIES 

THE quartermaster does not loom large against the 
heroic background of war. The Army's victualer and 
clothier collects few croix de guerre^ and his interest in 
the Congressional Medal of Honor is impersonal. So long as 
his work is going well, you hear little about him; but let him 
once supply some tainted beef to the troops in the field or fail 
to deliver on time the Army's winter underwear, and then the 
country takes notice of the quartermaster. 

God nowadays is on the side of the army with the best busi- 
ness organization, as even Napoleon himself might admit if 
he were to look over the cash balances of the late war. By that 
token the Quartermaster Service was the chief factor in the 
victory, because that organization became approximately the 
business office of the Army. For purely the creature comforts — 
food, clothing, and shelter — the Army spent far more money 
than it did for its weapons and ammunition ; but the activities 
of the army quartermasters embraced a much wider range of 
supplies than these. Theorize as you will about the evolution 
of the Army's purchasing offices during the war until they 
were brought together into a single centralized purchasing 
agency, the fact remains that the ultimate purchasing agency 
was essentially the Quartermaster Service, magnified and ex- 
panded in power. General George W. Goethals was Quarter- 
master General when the General Staff Division of Purchase, 
Storage, and Traffic (which unified all army buying and 
brought order into the supply situation) was built around 
his personality and ability, and thereafter his chief assistant 
bore the title of "Quartermaster General, Director of Purchase 
and Storage." The new Division retained all the duties of 
buying quartermaster supplies and assumed also the duty of 



QUARTERMASTER SUPPLIES 235 

buying all other supplies except the strictly technical ones. 
And even these were purchased by the older supply bureaus 
under the complete supervision of the Division of Purchase, 
Storage, and Traffic. 

When we approach the subject of the demobilization of the 
war industry which produced quartermaster supplies, we con- 
front what was, measured in tons and in dollars and cents, the 
greatest business undertaking of the war. These pages have 
been filled by the story of the spectacular contest of American 
industrial genius with the inanimate resources which it fabri- 
cated into airplanes, artillery, and ammunition ; but what filled 
the freight trains and the holds of the transatlantic cargo 
transports and the fleets of roaring trucks on the roads of 
France was not arms and the machinery of destruction to the 
degree that it was eatables and wearables, rentage, stoves and 
ranges, pots and pans — quartermaster supplies. There was the 
main weight and bulk ; into them went the most money. 

The war business of the Director of Purchase was repre- 
sented by nearly 16,000 contracts. The total face value of 
these contracts came to nearly $8,000,000,000. They repre- 
sented all food procured by the Army during the war and 
afterwards, all forage for the Army's animals, all clothing, all 
textile supplies of every sort, all shoes, harness, and other 
leather goods, all animals purchased, all motor vehicles, all 
wagons of every sort, all carts hand-drawn, engineering supplies 
of many kinds, all coal, oil, gasoline, paints, hospital equip- 
ment, medical and surgical supplies, hardware of all sorts, 
tools, tentage and other camp equipment, rope, office supplies, 
and many less conspicuous things. Several of these classes, it 
will be noted, consisted of munitions formerly procured by the 
separate technical supply bureaus, but the mass of them were 
the traditional quartermaster supplies. 

To get a comprehensive and clear-cut picture of the de- 
mobilization of this branch of war industry, let us start in 
France and follow back the home-bound expedition after it 
had closed up its business abroad. 

In the first place, the A. E. F. became a heavy purchaser of 



236 DEMOBILIZATION 

quartermaster supplies abroad. The purchasing office of the 
expedition became a great business organization. It bought 
supplies in almost every accessible country of Europe, and its 
agents even went to Africa and made purchases in Algeria and 
Morocco. These supplies were bought, not because America 
could not furnish them, but for the familiar sake of saving the 
use of the precious ocean tonnage. And a great deal of tonnage 
was saved by these foreign purchases. The Quartermaster 
Corps with the A. E. F. purchased 400,000 tons of miscel- 
laneous supplies, but chiefly food and clothing, at the cost of 
$150,000,000. In addition, many horses were procured in 
Europe. The greatest tonnage saving of all, however, was 
brought about by the arrangement which permitted the 
A. E. F. to purchase coal at the Welsh mines. The cross-Chan- 
nel fleet freighted more than 1,000,000 tons of coal from 
England. This not only relieved the transatlantic fleet of the 
necessity of lifting that amount of cargo, but it also permitted 
the employment in the Channel of vessels not well adapted to 
the transoceanic convoying. It is a moderate estimate that the 
American quartermaster purchases abroad saved the trans- 
atlantic shipment of 1,500,000 tons of cargo, a lading that 
would fill 300 large ships. 

Naturally the armistice found France, principally, and the 
other nations of western Europe to a slighter extent, liberally 
sprinkled with A. E. F. contracts for the production of quar- 
termaster supplies. Sixty-six French factories, for instance, 
were working exclusively for the Americans in producing 
bread, biscuits, macaroni, and candy. The question imme- 
diately arose as to the best method of stopping all European 
production for the A. E. F. The expedition's warehouses and 
depots were crammed to their capacities, and additional sup- 
plies were on the ocean in transports bound for France. A 
month, even a week, earlier it had not seemed possible that 
the industries of America and Europe put together, could 
produce an oversupply of these munitions, for the A. E. F. 
was looking forward to a strength of 4,500,000 men in 1919. 
But with the sudden armistice the expedition found itself with 



QUARTERMASTER SUPPLIES 237 

a stock of supplies on hand which it could not possibly 
consume. 

For that reason its European war industry was terminated 
abruptly. There was little of the tapering-off of production 
that was characteristic of the demobilization in the United 
States. The military authorities were not nearly so considerate 
of the welfare of their foreign contractors as they were of those 
at home. The American business abroad was so small, com- 
pared with the whole war industry of the countries of the 
Allies, that the outright abrogation of the American contracts 
could not cause a general industrial slump. But there were 
other considerations. The War Department could make use of 
much of the domestic post-armistice production, either as war 
reserves or as goods for sale. In Europe every pound of quar- 
termaster supplies produced after the armistice was likely to 
prove a dead loss to the United States. Such supplies were not 
needed for military reserves, of which there was an abundance 
already within the United States. They could not be sold 
advantageously abroad, because there was no market for them, 
with the Allied armies dumping their enormous surpluses on 
that same market. They could not be shipped in reasonable 
time to the United States for sale, because of the lack of ocean 
tonnage. Consequently, whereas it was the policy within the 
United States to terminate war industry gradually, the key- 
note of our industrial demobilization abroad was outright can- 
cellation. It was cheaper to pay cancellation indemnities than 
to accept the supplies that would otherwise have been pro- 
duced; and this was the general policy adopted in terminating 
all our foreign contracts, with such exceptions, notably in some 
of the airplane and artillery contracts, as are noted elsewhere 
in this volume. 

To investigate claims and negotiate settlements with the 
European contractors the A. E. F. created its Board of Con- 
tracts and Adjustments, which for several months served as the 
liquidating agency for the war business. Later the unsettled 
cases were turned over for final disposal by the United States 
Liquidation Commission. 



238 DEMOBILIZATION 

The termination of the foreign production for the A. E. F. 
was not nearly so puzzling a problem as the disposition of 
the excess military stores with the expedition. We had shipped 
from the United States to the A. E. F. over 6,000,000 tons of 
military supplies, and those shipments now crowded the ware- 
houses in the American areas. After the armistice the first step 
looking to the disposition of these stocks was a rough, but 
fairly comprehensive, inventory of all military property stored 
in our bases and depots. This inventory gave basis for an esti- 
mate of a surplus valued at $1,500,000,000 over and above 
what the diminishing forces abroad could possibly use. Nearly 
half these excess stores were quartermaster supplies, therefore 
goods more or less perishable. Long before the American cargo 
ships could transport these supplies back to America they would 
have lost value to the amount of untold millions of dollars. 
The Government faced an enormous loss. Whatever was to be 
done about it had to be done quickly. The one way out was to 
sell the surplus in Europe, but it was a grave question whether 
that could be done successfully at all. 

In the first place, all our army supplies had been placed in 
France without the payment of any import duties. So long as 
these supplies were being consumed by the American soldiers, 
well and good; but, when it was proposed to sell them to 
private purchasers outside the A. E. F., the French Govern- 
ment insisted upon its right to collect import taxes upon such 
supplies as were to be sold. When the United States was not 
ready to concede this point, then the French Government 
offered the alternative of permitting the United States to sell 
its surplus in France without payment of import duties, pro- 
vided the sales were made exclusively to the French Govern- 
ment itself. The United States felt obliged to accept this 
condition. 

Thus, in selling our surplus in France we were limited to a 
single customer; and when you can sell your product to only 
one buyer you must prepare to accept the buyer's scale of 
prices. Of course, the inhibition upon sales did not apply to 
sales to other foreign governments; for in that event the 



QUARTERMASTER SUPPLIES 239 

American goods were regarded as being in France in bond, and 
it was not incumbent upon the United States to pay the French 
import duties upon them. On the other hand, a physical reason 
operated against the sale of stores to European countries out- 
side France — the run-down and almost wrecked condition of 
the French railroads. The delivery of locomotives and cars by 
the Germans under the armistice terms virtually rehabilitated 
the rolling stock of the French railways, but the trackage had 
deteriorated during the war, and the incursions of military 
conscription had left the operating personnel poor in quality 
and deficient in quantity. It was next to impossible to ship 
anything out of France. During the early months after the 
armistice America sold surplus supplies to various countries of 
Europe outside France — particularly to Belgium and the 
liberated nations of southeastern Europe — to the value of 
many millions; but, up to August l, 1919, it had been able to 
deliver less than one-fifth of these supplies. 

Another advantage accruing to France as the principal buyer 
of the American surplus was that the A. E. F. was making 
what amounted to a forced sale. If anything was evident in the 
attitude of the French people after the armistice, it was that 
they earnestly desired to speed their departing military guests 
out of France. The American troops no less ardently wished to 
go, and it was the policy of the American Government to re- 
patriate them as rapidly as the shipping could be provided. 
The disposal of the supplies was a secondary consideration. 
If the Americans had attempted to hold out for favorable 
markets and good prices for their surpluses in piecemeal sales, 
they would have had to keep from 20,000 to 30,000 troops in 
France for several years to guard the unsold stocks. The alter- 
native of hiring civilian guards was out of the question, from 
the standpoint of expense alone. There was nothing else to do 
except sell out quickly for the best prices obtainable under the 
circumstances. 

These obvious advantages to the French in striking a bar- 
gain price for the bulk of the American surplus property in 
France was largely counterbalanced by the fact that, of the 



240 DEMOBILIZATION 

American quartermaster stores for sale, nearly half consisted 
of food supplies, and the highest-quality food then in Europe. 
There was no oversupply of food in Europe, but the very con- 
trary. England had surplus army property estimated to be 
worth more than $3,000,000,000; France herself had almost 
as much to dispose of; and Italy was to be a heavy seller; but 
the food stocks in all these Allied surpluses were not enough 
to satisfy the hunger of the undernourished or actually famine- 
stricken populations of Europe. The much-desired food was 
used by the American authorities to induce the French not only 
to pay good prices for materials they did not need, and of 
which indeed they had surpluses of their own, but also to 
accept responsibility for such liabilities as the American stores 
of unstable and dangerous ammunition and our accumulations 
of junk. 

Such were some of the conditions surrounding the bulk sale 
of A. E. F. surplus property to the French Government in the 
summer of 1919. This sale, as we have said, was consummated 
by the United States Liquidation Commission, the activities 
of which are to be discussed in greater detail farther on. Mean- 
while a sporadic and piecemeal sale of A. E. F. property in 
Europe had been going on under the direction of the General 
Sales Agent and General Sales Board of the A. E. F. The 
General Sales Agent took up his work on January 1, 1919. He 
was assisted by the General Sales Board, which was made up 
of representatives of all the army organizations that had any- 
thing to sell. Under this organization the sales of surplus 
materials reached a total of approximately $175,000,000 by 
the end of July, 1919, just before the general bulk sale was 
closed. Of these receipts the sales of quartermaster supplies 
accounted for $122,000,000. The supplies were sold almost 
exclusively to governments and relief and welfare commis- 
sions. The sales to commercial firms and individuals were 
insignificant. 

Almost as soon as the armistice was signed the needy nations 
of Europe opened negotiations for the purchase of excess 
quartermaster supplies of the A, E. F., particularly food. 



QUARTERMASTER SUPPLIES 241 

Semi-starvation was chronic in most of the newly liberated 
countries of southeastern Europe. The Poles were still fighting 
and needed supplies for their soldiers. Belgium and northern 
France were impoverished by the German occupation. Austria 
was in the grip of actual famine, and the hungry mobs were 
rioting in Vienna. In fact, some of the first surplus A. E. F. 
food to be sold was shipped into Austria. It was a situation 
which demanded scientific study, since, no matter how much 
the American officials individually might sympathize with the 
European civilians, their first duty was to safeguard the inter- 
ests of the taxpayers of the United States; and that meant to 
discover what ones of the needy were willing and able to pay 
the best prices. Consequently the General Sales Board of the 
A. E. F. created its information bureau, which investigated 
the conditions throughout Europe and reported to the Board. 
These investigations enabled the A. E. F. to distribute its 
surpluses intelligently. 

Before the general sales organization took hold, the Quarter- 
master Corps itself in France had been disposing of surplus 
stores during the first weeks of the armistice. Many of these 
early sales were made to Mr. Herbert Hoover for the Belgian 
Relief Commission. When, in January, 1919, Congress appro- 
priated $100,000,000 for the relief of starving Europe, Mr. 
Hoover, who had the spending of the money, was urged to 
make use of the excess A. E. F. supplies as much as possible. 
The largest single sale of A. E. F. surplus food was made to 
the Belgian Relief Commission. About $30,000,000 changed 
hands in the transaction, and the food sold included such items 
as 60,000,000 pounds of army issue bacon, 122,000,000 
pounds of flour, 6,000,000 pounds of rice, and 600,000,000 
cans of evaporated milk. All this time, too, the General Sales 
Board was selling directly to the Belgian Government ; and the 
Relief Commission cooperated with the Army to make sure 
that Belgium, through these two channels of supply, did not 
receive an undue portion of the army stores. There was always 
danger that Belgian speculators might acquire stocks of such 
surplus products as fats and soap and sell them into Germany 



242 DEMOBILIZATION 

at famine prices. Twice this cooperation was able to checkmate 
the plans of cold-blooded profiteers. Next to making advan- 
tageous sales, the chief concern of the General Sales Board was 
to distribute its products fairly among the countries in direst 
need. 

The Government of Portugal bought a large number of 
American army shoes. Czecho-Slovakia took 10,000 army over- 
coats, much other clothing, and several hundred tons of food 
supplies. The Polish Relief Corporation bought quartermaster 
supplies to the value of $1,500,000. Roumania took a con- 
signment of food and clothing at $7,150,000. Portugal took a 
shipload of potatoes f. o. b. Ireland. These nations, Serbia, 
Esthonia, and several others, were constantly in the market for 
American supplies. Esthonia bought 3,000 tons of army bacon. 
The French Government, too, was a large purchaser during 
this piecemeal selling, on one occasion buying American sus- 
penders to the value of $22,000, as well as large quantities 
of food and clothing. 

For the most part the United States accepted debentures 
rather than cash in payment for these supplies. It was ob- 
viously impossible to secure cash, for the small nations did not 
have any, and even France was skipping the interest payments 
on her five-billion-dollar debt to the United States. The Ameri- 
can Government accepted treasury notes or other official securi- 
ties at par, payable in three to five years with interest at 5 per 
cent. And, although such credits would have been heavily 
discounted in commercial centers, nevertheless America did not 
try to cover by charging high prices for the surplus stores or 
by exacting profits of any sort. The greater part of our supplies 
were sold at the cost of manufacture in the United States plus 
the cost of transportation to Europe, and plus nothing else. 
Consequently the sales proved to be a great stroke of adver- 
tising for the fair name of the United States. 

Trainload after trainload of supplies sold in this fashion 
left the American depots during the spring and early summer 
of 1919; but still, when the bulk sale to France went through, 
these shipments had seemed to make scarcely any impression 



QUARTERMASTER SUPPLIES 243 

upon the mass of the surplus, so great had been the reserves 
created in France by American industry. The utilization value 
of the surplus army property in France was estimated at 
$1,000,000,000. Of this quantity, quartermaster stocks (not 
including animals) were valued at $670,000,000. Of this sur- 
plus an amount worth $87,000,000 (consisting principally of 
new clothing) was returned to the United States, and the rest, 
except what had been disposed of by individual sale, was 
turned over to the French Government, the final delivery 
being made on November 15, 1919. 

None of these sales included the used supplies repaired and 
restored in the army salvage shops in France. Salvage was a 
new note amid the age-old wastefulness of war. After the great 
battles of the Civil War the countryside was littered with the 
debris of warfare. The bodies of men and animals were buried, 
and the soldiers did what they could to clean up by burning the 
refuse they could collect; but for the most part the disposi- 
tion of muskets, sabers, cannon, harness, and clothing was left 
to the souvenir hunter and to the slow action of the elements. 
After our battles in the World War far more materials were 
left abandoned on the field than after any conflict of the Civil 
War, but these materials were picked up and reclaimed for 
such value as the Army could still get out of them. And the 
Army found that it could make valuable use of salvaged ma- 
terials, and particularly of salvaged clothing. The savings 
wrought by salvage ran close to $150,000,000 in cash value, 
besides representing a great economy in the use of shipping space 
in the ocean transports. 

Whereas, before the armistice, many of the recovered sup- 
plies went into the army stores for reissue, in 1919, when the 
A. E. F. was rapidly dwindling in size, the salvaged articles 
were sold, and principally to the French. All through France 
one could see peasants of both sexes wearing articles once of 
American army issue. Paris might dictate women's styles to 
America; but Paris, Kentucky, where dwelt some of the seam- 
stresses doing home work for the great army shirt factory at 
Jeffersonville, Indiana, had something to say about what 



244 DEMOBILIZATION 

French women wore. The French peasant woman wearing an 
American army shirt, with a bit of ribbon for a collar, was a 
common enough sight in some of the former American areas. 
Another familiar makeshift was the skirt made of an ex-army 
blanket. Even the dumps, on which were thrown materials of 
which the salvage shops could make no use, were carefully 
sorted over by the peasants, who sometimes trudged for miles 
with their carts in order to avail themselves of these oppor- 
tunities. 

Extensive commercial sales of salvaged materials were also 
made. Crushed tin cans sold by the ton as metal scrap. Rags 
went to the French paper makers and waste wool to the English 
textile mills. Grease, damaged oats, damaged flour, and worn 
rubber tires also went by sale. The Polish Army bought re- 
claimed American harness by weight. A large number of outer 
uniforms, having shrunk in sterilization so as to be too small 
for reissue, were dyed black and sold to the Belgian Relief 
Commission for wear by destitute civilians. Germans paid 
record prices for grease and other kitchen waste products. The 
salvage sales in 1919 brought in more than $4,000,000. 

The horses and mules used by the A. E. F. were not included 
in the bulk sale of property to the French Government. The 
disposition of them (for few, if any, A. E. F. animals were 
returned to the United States) was a separate transaction, con- 
ducted almost entirely by the Remount Service of the A. E. F., 
a branch of the Quartermaster Corps. The A. E. F. acquired 
in all some 243,000 animals at a cost of $82,500,000. More 
than two-thirds of them were purchased abroad by the Ameri- 
cans. The mules numbered 61,000, and of these approximately 
half came from the United States, the rest principally from 
southern France and Spain. About 64,000 animals died in the 
service, and the rest were sold in Europe either to various 
governments or to civilians, the recovery from these sales 
being slightly more than $33,000,000. Thus the net war cost 
of the animals used by our forces in Europe was approximately 
$50,000,000. 

With Americans the horse is (or is supposed to be) a single- 



QUARTERMASTER SUPPLIES 245 

purpose animal, used exclusively for his power of motivity, 
whether that power be exerted for speed or for pulling a load. 
To many Europeans he also possesses gastronomic value, and 
this fact enabled the Remount Service to get good prices for 
condemned horses from the expeditionary corrals. About 
11,000 horses, broken down by service, were sold by the 
A. E. F. to French and German butchers, at an average price 
of $50 a head. 

Because of the dearth of farm animals in France, the French 
Government offered no objection to the sale of the surplus 
horses and mules directly to private buyers. The chief condi- 
tion made was that the animals must first be offered (at auc- 
tion) to farmers whose horses had been requisitioned during 
the war. If these men would not offer satisfactory prices, 
then anyone was to be allowed to bid. Then the French Gov- 
ernment arranged to take over 15,000 A. E. F. animals and 
dispose of them for the expedition. The prices obtained from 
the French Government under this arrangement were so much 
below what the A. E. F. was obtaining from its auctions that 
the United States Liquidation Commission sought and received 
authority to dispose of all the animals at auction. Because of 
the high taxes and auctioneers' commissions, even the auction 
sale was not satisfactory; and the Remount Service asked per- 
mission to sell animals at private sale. This permission was 
never formally granted, but nevertheless the Remount Service 
went ahead and sold thousands of animals directly to buyers. 
The average price received from the French Government was 
$77.58 a head, whereas from the auction and direct sales to 
private purchasers the average price received was $201.65. 

The French Government itself, by direct purchases from the 
A. E. F., took 50,000 animals at an average price of $190.21 
a head. Thousands of surplus animals at good prices went to 
the governments of Belgium, Poland, Czecho-Slovakia, and 
Bavaria. To civilians in France and Germany went 85,000 
A. E. F. animals. Approximately the last of the original 243,- 
000 had been sold when the final troops of the A, E. F. departed 
for the United States in the late summer of 1919. 



246 DEMOBILIZATION 

Although we sent to France some of the finest mules in 
America (and, therefore, in the world), there was at first some 
difficulty in disposing of them to the French buyers. The 
farmers of southern France knew the mule and justly valued 
it, and during the early months of the demobilization a con- 
stant stream of American army mules went into that region 
for sale. Finally the southern French mule market became 
glutted, and then it became necessary to "sell" the mule to the 
farmers in the American areas in northern France. The French 
peasants did not hold the mule's clouded ancestry against him, 
but what their thriftiness did object to was his dearth of hope 
of posterity. However, after a few of the peasants had bought 
and worked the army mules, the good qualities of the animal 
became widely advertised, and thousands of them thereafter 
were bought at good prices. 

After the armistice the first step in the liquidation of the 
quartermaster war business and of the other enterprises con- 
ducted by the Director of Purchase in the United States was 
to terminate the industry and to settle with the contractors, of 
whom, as is indicated above, there were approximately 15,900 
— parties to agreements which committed the United States to 
purchase supplies to the value of more than $7,800,000,000. A 
large part of these were quartermaster supplies, but they also 
included motor vehicles and engineering, medical, signal corps, 
and general supplies, the procurement of which, under the re- 
organization of the War Department, was placed in the hands 
of the Director of Purchase. 

The immediate result of the armistice was to silence the 
activity in these thousands of factories. The Director of Pur- 
chase sent broadcast by telegraph a general request to suspend 
all production while the War Department could estimate its 
position. After a few days the mills were permitted to resume 
production. Subsequently about 5,000 of the contracts were 
allowed to go through to completion. The remaining 11,000 
were terminated either abruptly, as with those under which 
no production had started, or by graduation, when that was 




Photo by Signal Corps 

A. E. F. SUPPLY TRAIN ON WAY TO RATION DUMP 




Photo by Signal Corps 

A. E. F. FLOUR ON WAY TO STARVING AUSTRIA 




Photo by Sujnul ( c;/ 



A. E. F. HORSES TO BE SOLD 




Photo from Quartermaster Department 

STORAGE WAREHOUSES AT JEFFERSONVILLE DEPOT 



QUARTERMASTER SUPPLIES 247 

advantageous either to the Government or to the industrial 
situation. 

Like the Ordnance Department and the Air Service, the 
Quartermaster Corps decentralized the supervision of its war 
industry into mxanufacturing districts — thirteen of them — 
which were called zones. When most of the purchasing activi- 
ties of the War Department were brought together under the 
Director of Purchase, these zones came along with the trans- 
ferred organization, as did also seven procurement divisions 
taken over from the other supply bureaus. During the de- 
mobilization, claims boards were established in all the zones 
and procurement divisions. These twenty primary boards were 
subsidiary to the general Purchase Claims Board, which in turn 
was responsible to the War Department Claims Board through 
the representative of the latter attached to the Purchase Claims 
Board. This was the organization which settled the vast war 
business conducted under the Director of Purchase. 

The general policies, the application of which to the ter- 
mination of the ordnance contracts we have already described, 
were followed in closing out the industry which manufactured 
our quartermaster supplies. The Government paid no prospec- 
tive profits, but stood all the legitimate expenses which the 
manufacturer had incurred looking to future production of 
finished supplies. 

But it was not all termination and no buying for the Director 
of Purchase after the armistice. There was still an enormous 
army in the field and camps which had to be sustained; and, 
while great surpluses existed in some branches of supply, in 
others, such as immediately perishable supplies, the stocks on 
hand were sufficient for only a few weeks ahead. The purchases 
between the date of the armistice and January 24, 1920, by 
which date the demobilization of troops was about complete, 
came to $61 1,000,000, of which food purchases accounted for 
$420,000,000. 

One national inheritance from the war experience in buying 
quartermaster supplies has been the creation at Chicago of a 
permanent subsistence school to which the Army sends officers 



248 DEMOBILIZATION 

and enlisted men for training as inspectors and buyers of food 
supplies. Another is the creation within the War Department 
of a division which studies the sources and supplies of the raw 
materials used by war industry and also determines the priority 
of access to these materials by the various consuming branches 
of the War Department. When the war came, the United 
States was sadly lacking in the very knowledge which these 
studies will develop. During the war the development of raw 
materials and the determination of priorities were adminis- 
tered by the Council of National Defense and, later and more 
successfully, by the War Industries Board, which became per- 
haps the most powerful and important of all the emergency 
war organizations. The War Department is thus retaining a 
nucleus around which another such organization might be 
built in a future emergency. 

No outline of the demobilization of the quartermaster war 
enterprises portrays an adequate picture of what happened 
unless it tells something about the termination of the Govern- 
ment's wool business. To protect its war interests the Govern- 
ment requisitioned all the raw wool in the United States in 
1917 and 1918. Uncle Sam himself became the wool trade, the 
sole dealer, the sole market. Although the Navy and several 
other government branches used wool, the control over the 
commodity was exercised by the War Department through its 
Wool Administrator at Boston, who reported to the Quarter- 
master General in Washington. 

On the first day of the armistice the Government had on its 
hands, or was obligated to accept delivery of, about 525,000,- 
000 pounds of wool, a quantity which may be visualized by 
comparing it with the total annual American production of 
wool, which is less than 300,000,000 pounds. About one-fifth 
of this quantity was Australasian wool which had been pur- 
chased by the Foreign Mission of the War Industries Board. 
About 100,000 bales (33,000,000 pounds) of the Australasian 
wool had been shipped to the United States. We were left, 
therefore, with a binding contract to accept 200,000 bales from 
the Antipodes, this to come piling in on top of an accumula- 



QUARTERMASTER SUPPLIES 249 

tion which comprised a huge surplus over and above the normal 
national consumption. By some clever business jockeying (the 
British having various American contracts which they also 
wished to terminate) the British Government was induced to 
cancel the unfulfilled portion of the wool contract. 

Even with this deduction, the Wool Administrator had, in 
the late autumn of 1918, about 460,000,000 pounds of wool 
to dispose of. The normal textile industry had never before 
been called upon to absorb such a visible supply, and there was 
some question if it would be able to do so. The manufacturers 
naturally began at once to urge the Government to dump its 
wool on the market. The 700,000 American wool growers, on 
the other hand, who had been receiving a high and stable price 
for wool (the price adopted on July 30, 1917) urged the 
Government to stay in the business for another year at least 
and take the 1919 clip at the war price. 

The decision in Washington was to sell the wool and get out 
of the wool business at once. This was displeasing to the 
farmers ; but, to prevent any drastic slump in wool prices, the 
War Department decided to sell its wool in auction sales, in 
which the Government itself would set minimum prices below 
which no wool would be sold. This action guaranteed that the 
growers would get a fair price for the 1919 clip. 

Within approximately a month after the armistice the wool 
auctions began — first at Boston, where in three days (Decem- 
ber 18, 19, and 20, 1918) the buyers bid in over 10,000,000 
pounds of wool, out of 17,000,000 pounds offered for sale. 
The unsold offerings, of course, were lots for which no buyers 
bid up to the minimum fixed prices. Although prices were fixed, 
only in a sense were they sustained artificially. For each sort 
of wool the Government fixed a minimum price which equaled 
what it would cost to import the same quantity and grade of 
wool and deliver it to the American market. Thus the world 
prices actually prevailed, except that the huge American sur- 
plus was artificially kept from being a depressing factor in the 
world price. To sustain prices higher than these would have 
attracted large importations and thus injured the growers. To 



250 DEMOBILIZATION 

allow prices to go lower than the importation prices would also 
have worked injury to the wool growers of the United States. 

As a further concession to the farmers, the Government an- 
nounced that it would stay out of the wool market when the 
1919 American clip began reaching the market in quantities 
sufficient to supply the mills. In accordance with this promise, 
the government wool sales ceased on July 1, 1919, and did not 
resume again until the following November. 

When the auctions suspended on July 1, more that 316,- 
000,000 pounds of the Government's wool had been sold. 
Auctions had been held twice a month in Boston and once a 
month in Philadelphia, and three sales had been conducted at 
Portland, Oregon, for the benefit of the western woolen mills. 
Upon the resumption of the sales in November the wool con- 
tinued to sell well, with the result that by the end of 1919 the 
sales had disposed of 365,000,000 pounds, and the success of 
the complete liquidation was assured. The sale of this wool was 
a triumph of merchandizing. The wool trade had never known 
such sales before, not even in England, the world center of 
wool, nor had the American trade ever before absorbed such a 
quantity of wool in such a short time. 

Like the storied mill which ground salt until it swamped 
the ship of the thieving merchant, the mill producing quarter- 
master supplies before the armistice was hard to stop after- 
wards, and its output embarrassed the War Department for 
want of space in which to store the excess supplies. As long as 
the home Army and the A. E. F. were expanding in size and 
the convoys grew in size and frequency, there was no critical 
backing-up of supplies. Immediately after the armistice, how- 
ever, the order came to ship no more freight to France, except 
food and other necessaries specifically requested. At the time of 
the armistice there were 600,000 tons of supplies on the docks 
in this country and 400,000 other tons moving toward the sea- 
board. Since the mills kept right on producing more, the flood 
of new materials inundated the supply service in this country. 
In December, 1918, the Storage Service was operating 65,000,- 
000 square feet of warehouse space in the United States. A 



QUARTERMASTER SUPPLIES 251 

year later it was occupying nearly 400,000,000 square feet, 
three-fourths of which was leased. A large quantity of this 
space was open storage, unprotected from the elements. These 
figures are exclusive of the quantities of warehousing and open 
storage occupied by the various technical bureaus, such as the 
Ordnance Department, the Air Service, and the Signal Corps. 
The operation of the general storage facilities was the charge 
of the Director of Storage, one of the chief functionaries of 
the Division of Purchase, Storage, and Traffic. 

An even greater problem than storage was the disposition of 
the enormous surpluses of goods which accumulated after the 
armistice. The first concern of the War Department in ap- 
proaching this question was the military future of the United 
States, In 1914 much was made of the thoroughness of German 
military preparation, which had been such that, when the fatal 
hour struck and the conscripts by hundreds of thousands left 
their homes and poured into the German barracks, for every 
man there was waiting ready a uniform, shoes, a helmet, 
underclothing, and everything needed to prepare him imme- 
diately for service in the field. What Germany had been able 
to accomplish by premeditated, long, and expensive effort, the 
United States now derives as a by-product of the war Germany 
forced it to fight. America, too, is now prepared in these minute 
details. Before any of the surplus quartermaster stocks were 
set aside for sale or other disposition, a complete and balanced 
selection of uniforms, overcoats, underclothing, socks, caps, 
shoes, and other nonperishable articles in the individual equip- 
ment of troops, in quantities sufficient to outfit an army of 
approximately 1,000,000 men, was set aside and placed in 
indefinite storage. In addition, stores of such supplies were 
retained for the future consumption of the regular standing 
Army, of the National Guard, and of the Reserve Officers' 
Training Corps. 

The war construction provided for the War Department 
three enormous interior reserve depots located respectively at 
Schenectady, New York, New Cumberland, Pennsylvania, and 
Columbus, Ohio. In these many of the reserve quartermaster 



252 DEMOBILIZATION 

supplies are stored. These installations are all of permanent 
and spacious construction. The warehouses are nearly all one 
story high, built of hollow tile and concrete, and divided into 
sections by fire walls. For additional storage the War Depart- 
ment is also using numerous wooden warehouses built at the re- 
tained cantonments. These buildings, though well constructed, 
are not fireproof and have to be guarded carefully to prevent 
their destruction. 

It was found further that various branches of the Govern- 
ment could make good use of supplies originally procured for 
the Army. Many of the araiy hospitals were turned over to the 
Public Health Service, and with the hospitals the War Depart- 
ment delivered large quantities of medical supplies. Inci- 
dentally it may be noted here that the Army has retained and 
stored sufficient field medical equipment for an army of 1,000,- 
000 men. Large lots of such general supplies as hardware, 
tools, rope, brushes, and office furniture went to the Bureau of 
Public Roads, the Interior Department, the Panama Canal, 
and other federal agencies. 

Then, several foreign governments were allowed to pur- 
chase from our excess supplies. Clothing, textiles, medical equip- 
ment, and other supplies, all to the value of $20,000,000, went 
to various Russian societies. The French Government took 
machine tools and other machinery originally built for the 
Engineers, to the value of $25,000,000. Belgium bought a 
large quantity of construction materials. 

In selling surplus materials to consumers in the United 
States, the preference went to charitable and welfare organiza- 
tions. Hospital equipment, for instance, was offered first to 
state and municipal hospitals, free clinics, and similar institu- 
tions. Prices for medical supplies were fixed far below the 
prevailing market prices; and yet the Government had manu- 
factured this equipment at such low cost that the financial re- 
covery from the sales represented practically every penny 
which the War Department had put into the supplies. General 
supplies were offered first to welfare organizations, the Young 



QUARTERMASTER SUPPLIES 253 

Men's Christian Association, the Boy Scouts, hospitals, sani- 
tariums, and relief societies. 

After that came the public. Private dealers were permitted 
to bid on lots of supplies. Regular days were set apart for the 
sale of various classes of commodities: Monday, textiles and 
leather goods; Tuesday, raw materials, machinery, and engi- 
neering supplies; Wednesday, general supplies; Thursday, 
medical supplies and motor vehicles; Friday, clothing; and 
Saturday, food supplies. These bidding sales were widely ad- 
vertised, in advance, and bids could be submitted either to the 
War Department in Washington or to any of the zone, or dis- 
trict, supply offices. The private consumer could buy army 
food, clothing, textiles, tools, and other commodities of house- 
hold utility either by parcel post (through the cooperation of 
the Post Office Department) or at any of the Army's retail 
stores, a great chain of which was set up throughout the 
country. 

By sales and transfers the Army, at the end of the first year 
of effort, had disposed of supplies originally procured under 
the administration of the Director of Purchase to the value of 
$357,000,000. The transfers and sales brought back to the 
War Department more than seventy-seven cents of every 
dollar originally expended in the production of these goods. 
The story of the ingenuity displayed by the Government's 
officers in selling these and other surplus supplies (particu- 
larly the surpluses in the hands of the Ordnance Department 
and the Air Service after the armistice) is left for another 
chapter. 

Before dropping the subject of the demobilization of the 
quartermaster war business, however, we should not overlook 
the disposition of the horses and mules acquired by the Army, 
but not shipped to France. The Remount Service purchased 
about 308,000 animals during the war. It started the war with 
about 90,000 animals on hand. The war losses amounted to 
33,000 animals. Approximately 68,000 were shipped to 
France. Thus, at the time of the armistice the Remount Service 
had in its stables and corrals nearly 300,000 horses and mules. 



254 DEMOBILIZATION 

About 215,000 of these were declared surplus and sold, and the 
rest were retained for the permanent Army. 

The decision of the Remount Service to sell 200,000 animals 
on the market as rapidly as the market could absorb them was 
roundly criticized by horsemen, who pointed out that normally 
the American market had never absorbed more than 60,000 
horses and mules in a year. The result would be, the critics de- 
clared, that the Government would get fair prices for the 
first 50,000 or 60,000 animals offered, and after that the 
surplus animals would be a drug on the market, not only forc- 
ing the Government to stand a great financial loss, but so de- 
pressing prices that dealers everywhere would suffer. On the 
other hand, it was costing the Government a dollar a day to 
feed and care for each of these animals. By retarding the sales 
the Government might be able to get better prices, but the gain 
would be more than absorbed by the cost of maintaining the 
establishment in the meantime. 

And so it worked out. The market, indeed, proved itself to 
be able to absorb the surplus animals, and prices even grew 
better as the sales progressed. The average price paid was $111 
a head, or about 57 per cent of the original average cost of 
$192. On the other hand, the Government escaped paying 
heavy maintenance charges. 

All the animals were sold at public auctions, 189 of which 
were held at thirty-nine different places. Great crowds of 
buyers attended the sales, most of which were held at camps 
where the animals were quartered. The local post exchanges 
sold sandwiches and other refreshments to the buyers. Although 
the Government guaranteed no animals, all of them were care- 
fully examined for blemishes and defects before the sales, and 
their demerits were noted in the lists read by the auctioneers. 
The Government could not afford to gain a David Harum repu- 
tation as a horse trader, for it had too many animals to sell. If 
dissatisfaction arose from the earlier sales, it would adversely 
affect the later ones. Only five complaints from buyers were 
made after the sales. These were referred to the Purchase 
Claims Board for settlement. 



QUARTERMASTER SUPPLIES 255 

The Government invested $74,000,000 in animals bought 
in America during the war. Its net loss on animals sold was 
$22,000,000, and on animals that died, $6,000,000. The best 
ot the animals on hand after the armistice were retained for 
use by the permanent Army. 



CHAPTER XVI 
BUILDINGS AND LANDS 

ONE of the major industrial activities conducted in the 
United States during the war was the construction of 
buildings for the Army. The Army's physical plant, 
as it existed on the day war was declared, was entirely inade- 
quate for the forces to be mobilized — so inadequate as to be 
of almost no use at all. Even the old headquarters of the War 
Department in Washington, which formerly had housed prac- 
tically all the administrative offices, were none too large to 
accommodate merely the office staffs of the Secretary of War 
and his principal assistants, so great was the expansion of the 
central administration; and as for the tens of thousands of 
officers, clerks, stenographers, messengers, and other personnel 
employed by the great producing and operating bureaus, they 
occupied literally miles of flimsy, unsightly "war buildings," 
which spread out like a defacing rash over the fair open spaces 
of the capital city. 

An even greater expansion of plant was to be observed 
throughout the country. The plant set up for the Army mo- 
bilized against Germany was a practically new creation, 
specialized for exactly the sort of war in which we were en- 
gaged. It was a war in which land transportation had to be 
linked to ocean transportation, and therefore the plant 
included vast facilities for the embarkation of troops and a 
string of mighty export terminals, or bases, strung out along 
the coast in order to make difficult any blockade of our over- 
seas supply line. It was a war essentially industrial in type, 
with unusual emphasis laid upon the development of special 
industrial products, such as powder and explosives; and there- 
fore the plant included dozens of new mills and factories, 
several of them industrial centers so large as to be virtually 



BUILDINGS AND LANDS 257 

small cities in themselves, with housing and modern municipal 
conveniences for their employees. It was a war in which new 
and hitherto unknown forms of combat had sprung into 
existence, and therefore the plant included equipped fields for 
the training of soldiers in such arts as flying and the employ- 
ment of poisons as weapons. Above all, it was a war which 
called upon the ultimate resources of American man power; 
and, as it turned out, the plant had to be adequate to house, 
school, amuse, care for, and maintain at least two million 
men, with all that that implies in barracks, drill grounds, parks 
for vehicles, water and sewer systems, lighting systems, roads, 
hospitals, and (in the maintenance line) depots and warehouses 
for supplies. 

It was all fresh creation, new construction. The building 
industry of the United States — and it is one of the largest and 
strongest of our industries — had never before been called upon 
to provide such expansion in an equal time. It follows that the 
entire building industry must have been engaged in the con- 
struction enterprise, that every available man who could drive 
a nail or lay a brick must have been employed upon govern- 
ment work. If he was not, he should have been ; for those in 
charge of the construction, unable to secure sufficient labor 
from the entire building industry of the United States, sent 
ships to Porto Rico and the Bahamas and brought back thou- 
sands of workmen to help out. The Construction Division, the 
war-begotten organization which was in charge of this activity, 
with 427,000 men on its contractors' pay rolls at the peak of 
its industriousness, yielded only to the United States Railroad 
Administration the title of greatest employer of war labor. It 
engaged in 581 separate construction projects, which called for 
an expenditure of over $1,100,000,000; and it completed 
most of them. 

Miles of docks, hundreds of acres of covered storage, hun- 
dreds of power plants and complete water systems, thousands 
of miles of roads, railroads, water mains, and sewer lines — the 
list grows monotonous simply because of the size of its items, 
which are not to be visualized by stating them in terms of acres 



258 DEMOBILIZATION 

and miles. The activity was at its height at the signing of the 
armistice, when it became incumbent upon the Construction 
Division to terminate the work. 

Four hundred and fifty army construction projects were 
under way on the day of the armistice. One hundred and thirty- 
one stood completed. The incomplete projects included some of 
the largest and costliest ones. But the salvage value of build- 
ings is small unless they can be sold to purchasers able to make 
use of them as and where they stand. Few war buildings were 
adapted to civilian use. They were highly specialized for a 
purely war use, and they were not often located where they 
could be of economic benefit to the country. A large part of 
their cost represented the evanescent element of labor, a value 
entirely destroyed when buildings are wrecked for the sake of 
salvaging their materials. The war plant, even incomplete, 
represented an immense investment, but one which would be 
almost altogether lost if the plant were to be knocked down 
for salvage. Therefore it was of advantage to the Government 
to carry on a surprisingly large amount of war construction 
after the armistice for the sake of getting the use-value from 
its investment by occupying these installations with the per- 
manent Army. 

But there were other reasons for continuing work. Among 
the largest and costliest of the construction projects were those 
which provided the ocean terminal bases at Boston, Brooklyn, 
Philadelphia, Norfolk, Charleston, and New Orleans. These 
installations were all of durable, fireproof construction; and, 
with their piers, their great warehouses equipped with labor- 
saving machinery, trackage, and the like, they were the last 
word of modem constructional science in developments of this 
sort. In appropriating the money for these port works. Con- 
gress had stipulated that after the war they should be used in 
the development of American foreign trade. Consequently the 
Construction Division went ahead after the armistice and fin- 
ished up these buildings. 

The port works alone were enough to account for a large 
portion of the money expended on construction after the armi- 



BUILDINGS AND LANDS 259 

stice, but in addition other great unfinished projects were 
carried through. As we have shown, the storage problem be- 
came acute only after the armistice, when the wasteful field 
consumption of supplies ceased and the materials coming from 
the war factories banked up in this country. Every warehouse 
and depot project incomplete on the day of the armistice was 
pressed to completion thereafter in order to provide shelter for 
valuable and perishable materials. This was another great 
branch of post-armistice construction. Add to these the con- 
tinued construction of hospitals (which had to be prepared to 
receive the thousands of wounded men in France on the day of 
the armistice), and it becomes evident why thousands of the 
war builders were kept on the job after the war itself had 
come to an end. 

The fate of every incomplete army construction project on 
the day of the armistice was submitted to the Operations Divi- 
sion of the General Staff, which looked at the percentage of 
completion, noted whether the Government owned the ground 
on which the construction was going forward, studied the avail- 
ability of the building for commercial use, and determined 
whether it was needed in the military plans, and then recom- 
mended that the construction be abandoned, curtailed, or 
completed. In general, the projects abandoned were those pro- 
viding additional facilities for the assembling and training 
of troops and those providing plants for the production of 
destructive munitions, such as toxic gas, powder, and loaded 
shell. Of the 450 projects incomplete on the day of the armi- 
stice, 182 were abandoned and 268 carried through. 

The completion of so large a quantity of the war construc- 
tion after the armistice enabled the Construction Division to 
go through the demobilization of its industry without accumu- 
lating large stores of surplus materials. Although in form, at 
any rate, the Division dealt directly only with contractors 
who took the various jobs, actually the Division itself pro- 
cured the lumber, cement, brick, structural steel, roofing, hard- 
ware, and the like, for the builders. The demand of the war 
construction upon the supplies of building materials was so 



26o DEMOBILIZATION 

great that nothing less than a centralized stimulation and con- 
trol of the entire market could have procured the materials in 
the quantities needed. The Construction Division's Procure- 
ment Division located the supplies and then arranged each 
building contractor's deals for them, even stipulating the 
producers, quantities, and the prices which must be paid for 
materials. This last was important, because the war builders 
worked under a sharply safeguarded cost-plus contract form, 
and therefore the Government was keenly interested in what 
the materials cost. In addition to procuring supplies for the 
contractors, the Procurement Division also purchased equip- 
ment for the war buildings — heating, ventilating, and power 
plants, fire extinguishers, refrigeration equipment, boilers, 
engines, and machinery of many sorts. Its purchases ran at the 
rate of $2,000,000 a day in the early autumn of 1918. 

After the armistice and after the temporary suspension of 
effort requested in order to give the Construction Division time 
in which to take stock of its position, the production of build- 
ing materials and supplies of which the Government would 
be able to make no use was rapidly terminated. The Procure- 
ment Division was made up of experts in all branches of 
building construction, and therefore this Division was made 
over after the armistice into the Construction Division Claims 
Board for liquidating its war business under the direction of 
the War Department Claims Board. In six months practically 
all the terminated contracts had been finally settled by this 
organization, at an average cancellation cost of 5 per cent of 
the face value of the contracts. 

The termination of supply contracts and of contracts with 
constructors of buildings not needed by the War Department 
after the armistice, left the Construction Division with large 
quantities of supplies on its hands. But these were by no means 
surplus supplies. The completion of a large quantity of war 
construction after the armistice saved the Construction Divi- 
sion from having to solve the problem of disposing of much 
surplus. Supplies accumulated for the terminated jobs were 
simply diverted to those ordered completed and thus utilized. 



BUILDINGS AND LANDS 261 

But although the Division had no large quantity of build- 
ing supplies to sell, it was charged, after the armistice, with the 
duty of disposing of the facilities at the 182 construction 
projects which were terminated. Many of these projects were 
large ones, those in this category being for the most part train- 
ing camps for troops. There was a camp shortage in 1918, and 
the Construction Division was doing everything in its power 
to overcome it. We were sending men overseas at the rate of 
300,000 a month; and, since it was desirable to give every 
overseas soldier at least six months' training, that implied 
camp accommodations for 1,800,000 men in the United 
States. The actual accommodations provided were for less than 
1,370,000 troops. In 1918, after the augmented rate of em- 
barkation became a fact, new training camp projects were 
consequently inaugurated at frequent intervals. Only a few 
days before the armistice the Construction Division began the 
construction of an enormous new camp which was to specialize 
in the training of infantry. All the national guard camps 
(sixteen of them) and most of the special -purpose camps, 
whether completely built or not, were condemned after the 
armistice for salvage. Most of these were veritable cities, some 
of them large enough to accommodate 40,000 men each, com- 
fortably — with the adverb accented, for the comfort was based 
on such substantial (and costly) installations as water and 
sanitation systems, electric lighting, pavements, sidewalks, and 
even stores, theatres, and gymnasiums. It was the task of the 
Construction Division to dispose of these cities to such mem- 
bers of the public as cared to buy. 

A city, however, is something more than an accumulation of 
buildings and other tangible facilities. Quite as much as upon 
foundations of rock, a city rests upon logic — the logic of its 
location. Naturally the Government built its camps upon 
cheap land, therefore upon land not in demand by the popula- 
tion, therefore upon land not so located as to make it a logical 
place for a city. And so, although it was thought at first that 
perhaps some of these camps might prove to be the nuclei of 
permanent civilian communities, that notion soon had to be 



262 DEMOBILIZATION 

abandoned for the reason that few civilian movements arose 
to occupy permanently the former war buildings. An attempt 
was made, and still is being made, to use the former Nitro 
Powder Plant as a permanent civilian industrial city, and one 
or two training camps in the South have been held together by 
their purchasers with the idea of establishing communities on 
their sites. The others, however, in which the Government had 
sunk hundreds of millions of dollars, were sold out to the 
wreckers, who bought them for the sake of salvaging the 
building materials. 

Now, there is nothing quite so second-hand as second-hand 
building materials. Boards are full of nail holes and sometimes 
covered with faded paint or disfiguring marks. Bricks are 
soiled, chipped, and worn, and conglomerated with stonelike 
mortar. Hardware and metallic fixtures are corroded and rusty. 
Such materials are not only wreckage and junk, but not even 
valuable junk. The chief cost in the construction of a training 
camp was the labor which laid the brick, installed the under- 
ground piping, smoothed, squared, and nailed up the lumber, 
and soldered the joints in the plumbing. All that labor value 
was lost when camps were salvaged for their materials. 

Yet this was not the only loss which the Government was 
forced to sustain. Practically all the camps were originally 
located on leased ground; and this fact implied that in razing 
the camps the Government was bound to restore the land to its 
original condition, or, in lieu of that, to pay to the owners 
the costs of restoration. These questions of property damage 
greatly complicated the demobilization of the training camps, 
because the amounts of damage were so hard to ascertain. 
Concrete roads had been laid across what were originally pas- 
tures; fertile com lands were crisscrossed with clay ridges 
thrown up above the water and sewer trenches. On the other 
hand, some of the camp improvements had drained former 
swamps and reclaimed them for cultivation, and such benefits 
would offset damages in other places. It was out of the question 
for the Government to attempt to settle these thousands of 
cases individually, because of the time it would take; and 



BUILDINGS AND LANDS 263 

therefore it was stipulated that the purchasers of the camps 
must assume all liabilities for property damage and hold the 
Government harmless from claims that might later be pressed 
in the Court of Claims. Naturally the purchasers made allow- 
ances for these damages in their bids, and wide allowances, too, 
since the extent of the damages was largely conjecture. This 
consideration further depressed the prices paid by the pur- 
chasers. 

The result was that the salvage of abandoned army camps 
brought back to the Government only a small fraction of the 
money put into them. Actually in scores of instances it would 
have been cheaper for the Government to abandon the im- 
provements to the landowners in return for quit-claims for the 
property damage. Public policy, however, prohibited such a 
short-cut method. Some of the leased sites had been donated to 
the Government before the armistice at the nominal rental of 
$1.00 a year or some other slight sum; but afterwards the 
chambers of commerce and other civic agencies which had made 
these concessions, for the sake of securing camps near their 
communities, refused to renew the arrangements, and the War 
Department was forced to pay regular rentals. Here was a 
consideration to force the sale of the camps on any terms pos- 
sible. The chief lesson learned from the war construction enter- 
prise was that the Government should buy and not lease a site 
when the value of the improvements is to exceed the value of 
the site itself. Only by holding such property for permanent 
use or gradual sale can the Government get value received for 
its investment. 

In general, the salvage recovery from camps and other in- 
stallations sold after the armistice amounted to about 15 per 
cent of the money invested in the original building materials. 
All labor values were lost. All wastage of materials in con- 
struction and demolition was loss. Many materials such as 
cement and concrete, road material, roofing, wood-stave piping, 
sewer piping, and so on, were a complete loss. The attention of 
the reader is invited to some typical shrinkages in value. 



264 DEMOBILIZATION 



Project Original Cost Salvage Recovery 

Camp Beauregard $4,300,000 $ 43,000 

Camp Bowie 3,400,000 110,000 

Camp Hancock 6,000,000 75.000 

Camp Logan 3,300,000 137,000 

Camp Wad&worth 4,000,000 95,000 

Camp Wheeler 3,200,000 144,000 



Note, however, that in disposing of these camps, the Govern- 
ment retained practically all the storage and hospital facilities. 

During the year following the armistice the Construction 
Division disposed of fourteen national guard camps, three 
embarkation camps, sixteen special and regular training camps, 
four flying fields, four hospitals, and many small groups of 
buildings. For these the Government received about $4,215,- 
000. In addition, parts of many other camps were sold; also 
construction materials of practically every sort. 

The most spectacular accomplishment of the Construction 
Division before the armistice was the building of the canton- 
ments, the primary training camps which housed the soldiers 
summoned into the military service by the Selective Service 
Law. These were much more substantial installations than the 
national guard camps, the salvaging of six of which was noted 
in the tabular statement above. The national guard camps pro- 
vided only tentage for the shelter of troops, whereas the canton- 
ments housed their inhabitants in stanch wooden barrack build- 
ings. A cantonment cost from two to three times as much as 
a national guard camp. Yet, on three months' notice, at the 
beginning of which not even the sites had yet been selected and 
acquired, the Construction Division prepared sixteen canton- 
ments ready to receive the first inductives called to the colors. 

The cantonments originally were all built upon leased 
ground. It was evident that, if the Government were forced to 
vacate the ground to the owners, the cantonments, salvaged 
for their building materials, would bring no greater recovery 
percentage of their cost than did the tentage camps. The 
Government's loss, in such an event, on each cantonment 



BUILDINGS AND LANDS 265 

would be twice or three times what it proved to be on the 
national guard camps. Before the end of the war was in sight 
the Construction Division had anticipated demobilization by 
presenting a plan to the Secretary of War for the purchase of 
the sites of the cantonments. Purchase would accomplish sev- 
eral desirable ends. As long as the cantonments were in use it 
would save the payment of rents. After the war was over, if the 
cantonments were retained by the Army, it would give the 
cantonments their full use-value, which was every penny they 
had cost. If, on the other hand, the decision was to dispose of 
them after the advent of peace, then ownership of the sites 
would permit the Government (i) to market the materials 
gradually and avoid beating down prices by glutting the 
market; or (2) to sell buildings intact, with the land on 
which they stood; or (3) to sell entire cantonments as they 
stood, together with title to the lands. Any one of these 
methods of disposition would bring a far greater salvage 
return than the forced sale of the materials and the payment 
of property damages. 

In March, 1919, the Assistant Secretary of War directed 
that the leased sites of fourteen of the cantonments — namely, 
Camps Custer, Devens, Dix, Dodge, Gordon, Grant, Lee, Jack- 
son, Meade, Pike, Sherman, Taylor, Travis, and Upton — be 
acquired by purchase. The investment in these cantonments 
was approximately $155,000,000. By continuing to use the 
cantonments, the War Department could get full value re- 
ceived for the money expended. By salvaging them after the 
manner of disposing of the national guard camps, the Govern- 
ment might recover $4,000,000 at the outside estimate. By 
selling the materials gradually or the buildings intact with 
lands, the recovery could be expected to run as high as $48,- 
000,000. The business logic of the proposition was irresistible. 

The purchase of this vast quantity of land was undertaken 
by the Construction Division. After the commanding officers 
at the cantonments had indicated what boundaries should be 
included, the Division sent out its field forces — on April 21, 
1919. First to go to work were engineers and surveyors to fix 



266 DEMOBILIZATION 

accurate boundaries and secure complete metes-and-bounds 
descriptions of the properties. Contracts were drawn with 
various responsible title companies to make search of the land 
titles and to guarantee them with title insurance. Next fol- 
lowed acquisition officers who closed sale contracts with the 
private owners. The sale contracts were finally signed in behalf 
of the Government by competent officers. With the acquisition 
officers traveled disbursing officers of the Finance Service who 
stood ready to pay spot cash for the lands the moment the 
sale contracts were signed. So rapidly was this work carried 
on that in two months the Government had acquired owner- 
ship to more than half the area on which the fourteen canton- 
ments stood. A year later about 55,000 acres had passed in fee 
simple to the United States at a price of $6,762,000. Con- 
siderable property was yet unacquired; but, although it had 
been estimated that the sites would cost ultimately $9,657,000, 
the indications then were that the Government would secure 
them for not more than $8,1 15,000. 

It was found to be impossible, however, to secure all the 
property so simply and easily. Some owners would not sell at 
reasonable prices ; other owners could not be found ; still others 
were under legal disabilities which prevented them from sell- 
ing. In such instances the recourse of the Government was con- 
demnation of the lands. Proceedings were instituted eventu- 
ally to condemn some 22,000 acres for government use. The 
condemnation proceedings were conducted by the Department 
of Justice, which found this work to be one of great magnitude. 

One of the interesting war developments in the United 
States was the change in the attitude of the War Department 
toward real estate. Before the war the various bureaus and 
other agencies of the War Department acquired their own real 
estate by lease or purchase as they needed it and as they could 
secure authority to procure it. The war itself resulted in an 
intense demand for real estate by the War Department as sites 
for its war buildings or as quarters to be occupied under lease. 
Real estate, therefore, came to be regarded as a commodity in 
the supply of the Army; just as much a commodity as food or 



BUILDINGS AND LANDS 267 

ammunition. And, as the procurement of other commodities 
was eventually administered and controlled by a centralized 
agency, so the centralized procurement of real estate was 
placed in the hands of a new organization called the Real 
Estate Service. 

The Real Estate Service acted as the Army's real estate 
agent. The various bureaus still originated the projects for 
the acquisition of property, and then the Real Estate Service 
acquired the property as agent for the bureaus. The Service 
was composed of experts who saw to it that deeds and leases 
were correctly drawn and that the Government made good 
bargains. 

The armistice, if anything, meant increased effort for the 
Real Estate Section, since the problem of the storage of sur- 
plus supplies was to be solved only by the acquisition of space. 
It was also necessary to dispense with high-priced locations, 
essential as they had been during the actual hostilities, and to 
substitute more economical facilities. Many of the War De- 
partment's war factories had been built on leased sites, and it 
was necessary to purchase these sites wherever it was expedient 
for the Department to retain the factory as a preparedness 
asset or where it was good business to buy the land in order to 
sell the factory advantageously. 

Although few obstacles had been thrown in the way of the 
War Department in purchasing property, it was discovered 
after the armistice that, because of existing and obsolete laws, 
it was most difficult to sell any. Up to the declaration of war 
the law which controlled this function provided that war de- 
partment lands useless for military purposes should be sold hy 
the Secretary of the Interior. When this law was enacted 
(1884) most of the lands occupied by the Army had come from 
the public domain, and it was logical to turn them back to that 
source when the War Department was through with them. In 
May, 1917, Congress authorized the War Department itself 
to sell national guard target ranges. In July, 1918, Congress 
authorized the President to sell, through the head of any 
Executive Department., lands acquired after the declaration of 



268 DEMOBILIZATION 

war against Germany to be the sites of war factories. In July, 
1919, Congress authorized the sale under identical conditions 
of lands acquired for storage purposes. These, however, were 
the only exceptions granted to the original rule. In fact, when 
the War Department went about the purchase of the fourteen 
cantonment sites for the possible purpose of selling these lands 
later and thus getting better prices for the buildings on them, it 
did so with the knowledge that it would take a special act of 
Congress to authorize such a sale. 

Congress, without warning, attached a rider to the appro- 
priation bill which was approved on July 11, 1919, forbidding 
the expenditure of any more money at all in the purchase of 
real estate by the Army except at the national guard camps or 
at the cantonments in use before November 11, 1918, and also 
except where the purchase of sites of industrial plants was 
necessary to protect the Government's interests. The Secretary 
of War ruled that the fourteen cantonments then being pur- 
chased were exempt from this inhibition, but the law abruptly 
put an end to projects of the Real Estate Service to buy some . 
300,000 acres at a cost of $8,000,000. At that time the Service I 
was buying 1 1 5,000 acres of land at Columbus, Georgia, to 
serve as an infantry school of arms, 120,000 acres at Fayette- 
ville. North Carolina, to be an artillery range, and several 
other large acreages for various military purposes. The project 
to acquire Camp Humphreys, the Engineers' camp in Virginia 
near the city of Washington, about 4,000 acres, was allowed 
to go through. 

On the first day of the armistice the War Department was a 
party to leases obligating it to pay $13,000,000 in rentals 
annually. By the end of December, 1919, the Real Estate 
Service had made a large net reduction in the number of leases, 
and the annual rent bill had dropped to approximately $5,000,- 
000, although in that interval the Service had acquired by 
lease hundreds of millions of square feet of new storage space. 




Photo from Construction Division 

WEST INDIAN LABORERS EMBARKING FOR HOME 




Photo from Construction Division 

VIEW OF CAMP SHERMAN 




Photo from Quartermaster Department 

IN AN ARMY RETAIL STORE 




Photo from Quartermaster Department 

CUSTOMERS AT OPENING OF ARMY RETAIL STORE 



CHAPTER XVII 
SELLING THE SURPLUS 

IN our earlier chapters, frequent and more or less extended 
references have been made to the disposition of surplus 
property acquired by the various branches of the Army 
during the World War. In so far as these references have been 
to surpluses with the American Expeditionary Forces, we have 
aimed to make the statements complete; but the references to 
sales of the surplus military property accumulated within the 
United States have been only incidental, inserted merely to 
make plain to the reader the extent of the tasks of the various 
production bureaus after the armistice. This may have seemed 
haphazard and confusing treatment of what was one of the 
most interesting and important phases of the demobilization 
of war industry. We are therefore taking occasion in this chap- 
ter to consider this phase — the disposal of the domestic sur- 
pluses of war materials — as a whole and in such detail as may 
be expedient. 

That same tendency toward centralization which succeeded 
in placing under one direction the procurement of all war 
supplies and, after the armistice, the liquidation of the Govern- 
ment's business engagements, also brought about a unified 
control of the sale of the surplus materials. Shortly after the 
armistice there was set up in the Division of Purchase, Storage, 
and Traffic a Sales Branch under an officer called the Director 
of Sales. Just as, after the formation of the "overhead" busi- 
ness organization known as the Division of Purchase, Storage, 
and Traffic, the various production bureaus still continued to 
procure most of their own supplies, but now under the control 
and authority of the Director of Purchase, Storage, and Traffic, 
so after the armistice these same bureaus sold and otherwise 
disposed of the surpluses they had acquired, but under the 



270 DEMOBILIZATION 

supervision of the Director of Sales. With the exception of a 
few sales made directly with various foreign governments and 
companies (property valued at $63,450,000 going in these 
transactions), the Sales Branch itself engaged in no selling, 
but merely directed the selling activities of the operating 
bureaus. 

' It is impossible here even to give an estimate of the value of 
the surplus materials left on the hands of the War Depart- 
ment after the termination of the war industry, for the reason 
that the War Department itself has never been able to arrive at 
an estimate. The subject has been so vast, so intricate, and so 
complicated by the changing of personnel and the evolution of 
organization, that it has seemed to be a hopeless task to attempt 

^ an inventory of the surplus property sold and for sale. We can, 
however, gain some idea of the quantities of it. It is estimated 
that the armistice found the Army with a surplus of war sup- 
plies on hand of a value of $2,000,000,000. This investment 
represented goods actually produced by American industry up 
to November 11, 1918, in the maintenance of a force of 4,000,- 
000 men and in anticipation of a force of nearly 5,000,000 in 
1919. But this, mind you, was surplus within the United 
States. On the same date — the day of the armistice — the 
A. E. F., through importations from the United States and 
through its own foreign purchases, had built up a surplus of 
supplies worth $1,330,000,000 over and above what it would 
return to the war reserves at home and outside of what it 
would consume while resting on European soil during de- 
mobilization. Thus we have the figure $3,330,000,000 as 
representing the value of the surplus supplies, munitions, on 
hand when the active fighting ceased. 

But this is only the beginning of the complete inventory; 
this was merely the surplus existing on November 11, 1918. 
War industry, under the policy of terminating it by graduating 
a declining production, still had weeks and months to go on 
producing goods, for most of which there was no war use. This 
dwindling manufacture by thousands of factories with millions 
of employees added to the surpluses materials worth many 



SELLING THE SURPLUS 271 

hundreds of millions. And still the tale is not told. War in- 
dustry had been fostered by huge federal investments in build- 
ings and machinery. These facilities, too, existed as surplus 
when the industry ended. This great accumulation was largely 
augmented by the machinery and other manufacturing facili- 
ties taken over by the Government in the settlement with the 
war contractors. The Government had purchased heavily of 
raw materials of various sorts, quantities of which remained 
as surplus after the armistice. In liquidating the war industry 
it added further to its stores of raw materials and took over, 
besides, a great mass of semi-finished materials in all stages of 
completion. When upon this heap we pile a great part of all 
the war building construction, and on that the additional sur- 
pluses automatically created when polity in Congress and in 
the executive offices made cut after cut in the size of the per- 
manent Army, then we are approximating the total of the 
surplus. 

This was all wealth, the true substance of the nation, its 
resources fabricated by its labor for the special purposes of 
war; and, with the war over, with little or no demand or use 
for these special materials, they could be disposed of only at a 
shocking sacrifice. Again, we cannot estimate the extent of the 
shrinkage, but we can indicate it. Up to March 1, 1920, the 
War Department had disposed of surplus property which had 
cost it $2,600,000,000. For this it had received $1,633,000,- 
000. The recovery, therefore, was 64 per cent of the cost; the 
loss, 36 per cent. The shrinkage in values is one of the wastes 
which any nation must contemplate and accept when it sets 
forth to wage war on the modem scale. The nation can get 
value received for the cost of its munitions only by using them 
in war. 

The largest of American companies, the United States Steel 
Corporation, in 1918, its busiest year, did a gross business of 
$1,745,000,000. The value of the surplus munitions produced 
before the armistice was nearly twice as great as that. The 
Steel Corporation, however, produced only a few dozen or 
few score sorts of products. The sorts of goods and materials 



272 DEMOBILIZATION 

to be disposed of by the Sales Branch were in number about 
250,000, and this range embraced goods known in many- 
branches of trade. The Steel Corporation and other great com- 
panies usually sell to a relatively small group of customers, 
who take the products in wholesale quantities. The market 
which the Sales Branch entered consisted of the entire United 
States, with 1 10,000,000 possible buyers; for part of the prob- 
lem was to dispose of surplus materials by retail sale to the 
public. All in all, this may be regarded as the greatest mer- 
chandizing enterprise ever undertaken in America. 

The 250,000 catalogue items in the sales list were divided 
roughly into seven commodity groups, as follows: (1) 
railway and building materials and contractors' equipment; 
(2) manufacturing plants and plant sites; (3) machine tools; 

(4) vehicles and airplanes, including spare engines and parts; 

(5) quartermaster stores; (6) ordnance and technical equip- 
ment, including office equipment; and (7) raw materials, scrap 
metal, and waste materials. 

It was recognized at the outset that to throw on the market 
vast quantities of supplies and materials in all these seven 
categories was to court disaster to the industrial situation. 
Business and industry immediately after the armistice were in 
a ticklish position. They faced the complete transition from 
the war to the peace basis, an uncharted region through which 
it seemed likely that they could go safely only under the wisest 
of guidance. If, in addition to its inevitable troubles of recon- 
struction, industry were to have to face cutthroat competition 
with the surpluses of the very goods its own mills had created 
during the war, it was evident that the difficulties of the tran- 
sition might be doubled. 

To safeguard business as much as possible and still dispose 
of the surplus materials, the War Department adopted certain 
general principles or policies. The first of these was that the 
general Government, through its several departments and in 
the public work which the departments were doing, should 
utilize all the surplus war materials they could absorb. The 
second and more important was to sell all general commodities 



SELLING THE SURPLUS 273 

to the public through the medium of the industries which had 
produced these commodities and thus to avoid disastrous 
breaks in market prices — even, sometimes, to sustain prices. 

There was widespread disapproval of this latter policy. The 
public for months had been stung and irritated by prices which 
many regarded as the exactions of profiteers; and now at last, 
with huge stocks of supplies on hand which had to be sold or 
lost, the people anticipated a dumping which would smash 
down prices and bring about the discomfiture of those who had 
seemingly victimized them. But this was not to be. The Gov- 
ernment adopted the view that it was better to have the high 
(but normally declining) prices and to keep the wheels of 
industry turning than to risk a collapse of prices that might 
bring with it general unemployment and business stagnation. 

Later on, when it had become evident that business was 
making a safe passage through the reconstruction period, large 
stocks of clothing and food supplies were sold directly to con- 
sumers at prices considerably below the market averages. 

Particularly in raw materials the policy of sale through, or 
in cooperation with, the industry affected by the sale worked 
as the Government had expected it to work. The War Depart- 
ment found itself after the armistice with a surplus of 125,- 
000,000 board feet of soft lumber over and above what it 
would need in completing the various unterminated con- 
struction projects. This was lumber enough to build 5,000 
houses. To have dumped this on the market would have 
paralyzed a large part of the lumbering industry until the 
market had absorbed the army lumber. Accordingly the WaF] 
Department entered into a contract with the authorized repre- \ 
sentatives of the lumber industry whereby it was agreed that 
the lumber should be marketed gradually and at prices fixed 
by agreement between the Government and the industry. 
Under this arrangement the surplus was all sold without dis- 
turbance to the industry and at prices which brought a good 
return to the Government. 

In the spring of 1919 the Government had on hand a surplus 
of something more than 100,000,000 pounds of copper. The 



274 DEMOBILIZATION 

copper industry was in a serious plight. The producers had on 

hand a surplus of 1,000,000,000 pounds, but still they were 

keeping the mines, smelters, and refineries running to prevent 

unemployment and in the expectation that the resumption of 

normal business would soon create a demand for copper. Any 

dumping of the war department surplus most certainly would 

have closed the mines. Instead of that, the Government sold 

?' the entire surplus back to the producers. The industry con- 

/ tinued in operation, and the Government received an average 

i~~~-.S){ seventeen cents a pound for its copper, a fair recovery. 

The War Department's surplus of 161,000,000 pounds of 
sulphur was sold through the industry. At the armistice the 
Government had on hand some 600,000 tons of nitrate of soda 
imported from Chile for the powder factories. About half of 
this was retained as a war reserve. The Department of Agri- 
culture disposed of 125,000 tons of it to farmers for use as 
fertilizer. About 142,000 tons was sold for the War Depart- 
ment at market prices by the nitrate importers who had sup- 
plied the commodity to the Government in the first place. A 
stock of 59,000 tons of nitrate in Chile, the property of the 
American Government, was brought to the United States and 
sold by the importers on the same terms. Approximately 730,- 
000 bales of cotton linters in the war department surplus are 
being used by the commercial powder industry on such terms 
as will return to the Government from one-third to one-half 
the original cost of the linters. A surplus of 66,000,000 pounds 
of ammonium nitrate was sold at prices which reimbursed the 
War Department to the extent of about one-third its war-time 
cost. 

It should be borne in mind that all these sales were actually 
consummated by the production bureaus in whose hands the 
supplies remained as surplus after the armistice, the Sales 
Branch merely coordinating the sales and approving the terms. 
^ — It will be impracticable here to go into the details of the salvage 
and sales activities of all the bureaus, but enough can be told 
to illustrate the ingenuity and business enterprise employed in 
disposing of the great war surpluses. As the occasion demanded, 



SELLING THE SURPLUS 275 

the government salesmen had to be merchants, batterers, auc- 
tioneers, and even partners with commercial organizations. 

The production bureaus were organized for their salvage 
operations precisely as they had been for manufacturing the 
supplies and, later, for liquidating the business arrangements 
with the contractors. Those which had created manufac- 
turing districts before the armistice, afterwards established 
district salvage boards to take over and dispose of the surpluses 
accumulated by the district claims boards in their settlements 
with the contractors. These district salvage boards, in turn, 
were subsidiary to the main bureau salvage boards, which, in 
turn, reported to the Sales Branch of the Division of Purchase, 
Storage, and Traffic. The surpluses of ordnance materials, for 
instance, were handled by the Ordnance Salvage Board through 
its district salvage boards, and the same system obtained in 
the Air Service and under the Director of Purchase. The other 
bureaus disposed of their surpluses through central salvage 
boards in Washington. 

Perhaps the chief challenge to the ingenuity of the govern- 
ment salesman was that offered by the ordnance surpluses, for 
these were probably the most highly specialized of all military 
supplies; yet it was often the task of the Ordnance Salvage 
Board to find civilian needs to which these supplies could be 
adapted. Great commercial successes have sometimes been 
scored by those able to develop new uses, and therefore new 
markets, for the goods they manufactured. In like fashion the 
ordnance salvers, by taking thought, could sometimes convert 
what had been regarded as junk into merchandise for which 
there was a brisk demand at good prices. 

These activities took the salesmen far afield. They disposed 
of lumber to the Panama Canal operators, sold nitrate to the 
Government of Holland, converted the great ammonium 
nitrate plant at Perryville into a hospital operated by the 
Public Health Service for the benefit of disabled ex-service 
men, transferred tin to the Navy Department, and demon- 
strated to the Department of Agriculture that the containers in 
which it had been intended to ship trench mortar shell could 



276 DEMOBILIZATION 

serve equally well as containers of dehydrated vegetables. 
They disposed of rope to the Department of Agriculture. They 
sold a thousand revolvers to the police force of Washington. 
To the federal road-builders they turned over trucks and 
smokeless powder and trinitrotoluol to be used as blasting 
explosive. 

One of the largest single undertakings in ordnance salvage 
was the disposal of manufacturing plants either built outright 
j or equipped with machinery by the Government. There were 
( some 300 of these, and the Government's investment in them 
\ was practically $525,000,000. The array included cannon and 
gun-carriage plants, shell-loading plants, powder works, chemi- 
cal and acid plants, toluol plants, small-arms factories, ammu- 
nition factories, nitrate-fixation plants, and numerous shell- 
making plants. In the liquidation of the ordnance industry 
large additional quantities of ordnance production machinery, 
both new and used, fell into the hands of the Government. 
All of it, beyond the selections retained in the military re- 
serves, had to be sold. During the first year after the armistice 
the sales of ordnance plants and machinery brought in a return 
of over $70,000,000. (Manufacturing facilities worth double 
that amount had either been stored or installed at the various 
arsenals, or else had been turned over to other departments of 
the Government.) In the spring of 1920 half the vast accumu- 

\^^lation of ordnance plants and machinery had been disposed of. 

" The most spectacular sale accomplished in this branch of 
ordnance salvage was that of the smokeless powder plant at 
Nitro, West Virginia. This plant was a self-contained town, 
with three square miles of land in its site, with houses for 
20,000 people, theatres, schools, churches, stores, electric lights, 
paved streets, gas, a telephone system, water, and other 
modern improvements. The Director of Sales himself con- 
ducted the negotiations whereby the entire establishment was 
sold en Hoc to a development corporation, which planned to 
resell the establishment piecemeal to manufacturers and thus 
create a permanent industrial city at Nitro. The corporation 
paid a flat price to the Government for the Nitro plant and in 



SELLING THE SURPLUS 277 

addition admitted the Government as a partner in the profits. 
Several companies have already occupied factory buildings 
there. The Ordnance Salvage Board maintained representa- 
tives at Nitro to approve the resales as they were made. 

The Ordnance Department took over from the producers 
after the armistice large quantities of steel in process of being 
made into artillery shell. A great deal of this steel consisted of 
finished and semi-finished parts for shell. No matter how much 
labor had been expended on these shell parts, their only value 
commercially was as melting stock. The users of steel evidently 
expected to be able to pick up the Government's surplus stock 
of it after the armistice for a song: the highest bids for the 
first offerings of it on the market were only about $12 a ton. 
The ordnance salvers cannily decided not to sell at such prices 
and, except for some trifling, but advantageous, sales, did 
nothing about it until the summer of 1919. By that time the 
commercial revival began to make itself felt in the demand for 
steel, the prices of which were further enhanced by an im- 
pending strike in the steel industry. Then it was that the 
wisdom of holding on to the steel stocks became evident. The 
sale of shell steel was handled directly by the Ordnance Sal- 
vage Board, which, after the prices rose, dealt only with heavy 
purchasers. The average price paid to the Government for this 
steel was about $30 a ton. The Salvage Board handled about 
1,000,000 tons of it. 

There were also large surpluses of nonferrous metals, — 
copper, zinc, lead, tin, antimony, and nickel, — the stocks in- 
cluding nearly 20,000 ounces of platinum, which sold, it may 
be noted, for an average price of $105 an ounce — just about 
what it had cost. The copper, as we have seen, went back to the 
producers at a fair price. The Board sold 65,000,000 pounds of 
zinc at an average of eight cents a pound. The surplus of brass 
amounted to 135,000,000 pounds, and this has been selling at 
good prices. During the year following the armistice the salvers 
disposed of nonferrous metals worth $40,000,000. 

The salvers had to use their ingenuity in order to dispose of 
the surplus cupro-nickel advantageously. Cupro-nickel is an 



278 DEMOBILIZATION 

alloy of copper and nickel which is used in making jackets for 
small-arms bullets, but the metal has no commercial use. The 
Government was able to secure not a single bid for any of its 
large surplus of cupro-nickel. The alloy is too tough for 
ordinary metal-working machinery. The ordnance salvers first 
proposed that this metal be used at the Mint in making five- 
cent pieces, but the surplus of it was so large that it would have 
taken many years to consume it all in this use. The experi- 
menters then took hold and found that, by melting cupro- 
nickel and further alloying it with zinc, they could produce 
German silver, a commodity for which there is extensive in- 
dustrial use. This fact was demonstrated to the market, and the 
first result was a bid for 5,000,000 pounds of cupro-nickel at 
a favorable price. 

An even more conspicuous example of resourcefulness on the 
part of the ordnance salvage forces was the sale of the so- 
called cartridge cloth. The Ordnance Department was an ex- 
tensive war consumer of textiles of many kinds. Silk, cotton, 
wool, felt, and linen are used in numerous forms in the pro- 
duction of ordnance supplies. The quantities acquired during 
the war may be estimated from the fact that the surpluses left 
after the armistice brought on sale close to $25,000,000. In 
the surplus of textile goods was a considerable yardage of 
what was called cartridge cloth ; and it must be said that at the 
outset none of the excess ordnance supplies seemed to be so 
hopeless as a salvaging proposition, so certain to account for a 
large loss of investment, as this stock of cartridge cloth. 

The cartridge cloth was used during the war to make bags to 
be filled with the smokeless powder used as the propelling 
charges for guns of the larger calibers. The cloth was made of 
silk, for the reason that silk alone among fabrics bums per- 
fectly and leaves no ash to smut the barrel of a gun. Cotton, in 
contrast, or any other fabric, is likely to leave charred pieces 
of itself smouldering in the breech of a gun after a shot; and 
these smouldering pieces may touch off the new powder charge 
prematurely and kill or maim the men serving the gun. More- 
over, silk alone does not cause a flash at the muzzle of the gun 



"^' SELLING THE SURPLUS 279 

when the shot is fired. Such flashes at night betray the gun's 
position to the enemy. 

But though cartridge cloth was made of pure silk, what a 
silk it was I Naturally, to keep down its cost, it was woven of 
the cheapest silk materials possible to obtain. It was made of 
what were practically the by-products of silk-weaving — noils 
and waste silk. Noils are cut cocoons, immature cocoons, and 
combings from the outsides of cocoons. The woof of cartridge 
cloth was made from silk noils and the warp from waste silk. 
All raw silk is filled with a natural gum, which in commercial 
processes is boiled out before the silk is woven. Since this gum 
did not impair the fabric for use in guns (the gum gave perfect 
combustion and left no ash), it was left in the raw material in 
order to keep down the cost of the fabric. In order to facilitate 
the manufacture of cloth from noils, the noils were carded, 
combed, and spun in oil, oil not being objectionable in the 
cloth. The result was a greasy, dark colored, rough cloth, look- 
ing like oily gunny sacking, a fabric about as unalluring as any 
that could be imagined. And it cost the Government on the 
average seventy- two cents a yard. At the time of the armistice 
the Ordnance Department had on hand about 22,000,000 
yards of it. Most of this quantity was set aside as a war reserve. 
The rest was offered for sale. The best offer for it was twelve 
and one-half cents a yard. The Government, therefore, faced a 
considerable loss. 

The ordnance salvers were not content to swallow this loss. 
The Salvage Board obtained $20,000 with which to experi- 
ment with the silk. An expert silk maker in the Sales Branch 
then tried boiling out the gum and oil and otherwise processing 
the fabric, after which he bleached, dyed, printed, and napped 
it. The result was a beautiful fabric, suitable for outer gar- 
ments for both men and women, and for millinery, drapery, 
and upholstery. Beautiful color effects were obtained with it 
by certain silk-finishing companies. With this demonstration 
before the trade, the Salvage Board again asked for bids, and 
this time received a number of them, offering prices ranging 
from thirty-one cents a yard to forty. This still was not enough 



28o DEMOBILIZATION 

for the salvage salesmen, who went out and negotiated a con- 
tract with two companies — the Bush Terminal Company of 
New York and the McLane Silk Company of Turners Falls, 
Massachusetts — which netted the Government eighty-five and 
a half cents a yard, plus half the profits received from the sale 
of the fabric. A considerable quantity of the silk was sold under 
this arrangement. 

The expenses of the Ordnance Salvage Board were less than 
6 per cent of the money received from sales and transfers. This 
sales cost compares favorably with similar costs in the mercan- 
tile world. 

The fact that a large part of the money spent by the Air 
Service during the war was represented after the armistice by 
finished airplanes and airplane engines precluded any con- 
siderable recoupment of the war expenditures from sales of 
surplus materials afterwards, since, at present, planes and 
engines have small commercial utility. Aviation engines are too 
light and too powerful for ordinary tasks, and no real market 
for airplanes has yet existed in the United States. Conse- 
quently, the sales of air service surplus were virtually limited 
to commodities having commercial use, such as tires, photo- 
graphic equipment, linen fabric, fur used in making aviators' 
clothing, and the like. Some of these surplus commodities, 
however, went at good prices. One New York concern bought 
372,500 Chinese dogskins for approximately $700,000. 
Nearly 5,000,000 board feet of surplus mahogany, used in 
making propellers, sold for $150 a thousand feet. Great quan- 
tities of small tools from the airplane factories, millions of 
yards of cotton fabric, and nearly 4,000,000 pounds of long- 
staple cotton sold at good prices. The Government realized 
$700,000 from the sale of 20,000,000 feet of spruce, fir, and 
other soft woods used in the manufacture of airplanes. One 
large sale of airplanes and engines was recorded. For $380,000 
the Nebraska Aircraft Corporation of Lincoln, Nebraska, 
bought 280 Standard J-i training planes without engines and 
280 Hispano-Suiza engines to drive them. 

To sell its surplus in the United States the Air Service set 



SELLING THE SURPLUS 281 

up field disposal agencies at Boston, New York, Buffalo, 
Chicago, Detroit, and Dayton. The property declared surplus 
was valued at approximately $115,000,000. Up to the present 
(July, 1921) goods to the value of $97,000,000 have been 
sold from this surplus, and there is an unsold residue valued at 
$18,000,000. The average recovery has been 62 per cent of 
the cost. 

The disposition of the property acquired by the United 
States Spruce Production Corporation in the forests of the 
Pacific Northwest was delayed by the congressional investiga- 
tion of the affairs of that official organization. The cost value 
of all salvageable property was calculated at approximately 
$19,000,000, of which $7,000,000 represented the cost of 
three railroads for hauling logs. The rest of the investment was 
represented by sawmills, roads, hotels and barracks for woods- 
men, hoisting engines, drying kilns, and nearly 100,000 other 
items, among which were 22,000,000 feet of lumber produced 
and on hand. The lumber of commercial grades was promptly 
sold, and the Air Service arranged to take over the 3,088,000 
feet of airplane lumber stock, for a consideration of approxi- 
mately $1,000,000. The sale of the remaining property has 
gone on slowly, and the recovery has been low in ratio to the 
original cost. 

The sale of surplus engineering materials brought to the 
Government the unusually high average recoupment of 87 per 
cent of the cost of manufacturing the supplies. The reason is 
that the largest and most valuable part of the surplus consisted 
of railroad construction materials and rolling stock. The rail- 
roads of the world, and particularly those of Europe, had been 
neglected during the war, and their rejuvenation had become a 
necessity even paramount to that of reconstructing general in- 
dustry. Such governments as those of France and Poland were 
glad of the chance to secure American locomotives, cars, and 
cranes at the cost of their manufacture. The largest single sale 
of engineer supplies was made to the French Government, 
which paid approximately $63,000,000 for 485 freight loco- 
motives and nearly 20,000 freight cars. By the spring of 1920 



282 DEMOBILIZATION 

surplus engineering supplies which had cost $128,000,000 had 
been sold for about $1 10,000,000. Large quantities of excavat- 
ing machinery and other contractors' equipment were trans- 
ferred to the Bureau of Public Roads. 

Surplus chemical warfare materials, on the other hand, 
proved to have low salvage value. After the armistice the 
Chemical Warfare Service found itself with some 1,000 car- 
loads of surplus materials on its hands. These materials had 
cost $1 1,000,000. Of the surplus, obsolete gas masks and other 
accumulations valuable to no one and therefore unsalable, 
accounted for $2,000,000. The rest consisted principally of 
raw materials and machinery. Certain of its raw chemicals 
the Service was able to dispose of to the artificial dye industry 
at a profit. The outside gas-making plants attached to the 
Edgewood Arsenal were sold by auction to manufacturers of 
chemicals. 

Though the sales of surplus factories, machinery, raw ma- 
terials, and scrap and junk were of intense interest and concern 
to industry and business generally, the great masses of people 
in this country knew little or nothing about them. The wage 
earners, the millions drawing salaries of moderate range, were 
not beneficiaries — not immediate beneficiaries, at any rate — of 
the bargains the Government was offering. The trade journals 
were filled with advertising and reading matter about the sales 
of the war surpluses, but the newspapers seldom had anything 
to say about them. No doubt there were hundreds of thousands 
of Americans who, immediately after the armistice, reading 
about the excess stores which were overflowing the Govern- 
ment's enormous warehouses, expected to benefit personally 
and at once by the situation. It was the opportunity of a life- 
time to pick up a new stock of kitchen utensils for a song, or a 
lawn mower, or a new Dodge car at a knock-down price, or, at 
least, new supplies of underclothing and other garments, or of 
food at figures which would make the corner grocer squirm. 
But as the weeks and months went by and none of these oppor- 
tunities ever presented themselves, it became obvious to any 
thinking person that the Government itself must be in league 



SELLING THE SURPLUS 283 

with the profiteers and must be holding out its stocks in order 
to let the gouging go on without hindrance. 

Those who jumped to such a conclusion were not aware of 
the restrictions which their own representatives, the men in 
Congress, had thrown about the sale of government property. 
Just as the law forbade (with certain exceptions and qualifica- 
tions already noted in this volume) the government executives 
to buy supplies except from the best bidder in a competition 
for the business, so it forbade them to sell supplies except to 
the best bidder. The buyers therefore had to compete with 
each other for the surplus stocks, either in auction sales or by 
sealed bids submitted after goods had been duly described and 
advertised. And since the Government had its own sales ex- 
penses to consider and therefore could not hold auctions to 
dispose of single cans of tomatoes or advertise for bids for 
individual hams, the ultimate consumer, unless he were pre- 
pared to purchase by the carload, was as much out of it as if 
the supplies were stored on the moon. 

Not until July 29, 1919, did Congress come to the relief of 
the ultimate consumer by passing an act authorizing the War 
Department to sell food, clothing, and household supplies at 
retail. Within ten days the Surplus Property Division (of the 
Division of Pu,rchase, Storage, and Traffic, which had charge 
of all food, clothing, and general supplies) inaugurated a plan 
of direct selling by parcel post. Price lists and order blanks 
were sent to the 58,000 post offices of the United States, and 
the postmasters were instructed to receive orders and cash and 
send consolidated requisitions and payments to the Surplus 
Property Division. This plan was not a success, thanks prin- 
cipally to the postmasters' unfamiliarity with such work; and 
a few weeks later it was abandoned altogether in favor of the 
army retail stores. Through these stores the masses of con- 
sumers at last came into direct touch with the surplus war 
supplies. 

The store system was established on September 25, 1919. 
At the stores a consumer might buy food and other supplies 
over the counter in such quantities as he chose; or, if he lived 



284 DEMOBILIZATION 

too far away to visit the store, he might order from it goods to 
be delivered by parcel post, postage prepaid and goods insured 
at government expense. At first the Army established twenty- 
five stores, and these did so well that additional stores and 
branches were added, until by the late winter of 1919-1920 
there were seventy-seven places where consumers might go and 
buy, at reduced prices, the goods which their tax payments and 
bond purchases had enabled the Government to procure. The 
stores were operated under the supervision of the fourteen zone 
supply officers. 

In selling directly to the consumer, the War Department 
adopted the policy of pricing goods at four-fifths of the preva- 
lent retail market prices. Since the cost of living had begun to 
decline in late 1919 and the early part of 1920, this policy 
meant a loss to the Government, which had paid war prices 
for the supplies; but it was not a large loss. On the average, the 
retail sales brought back nearly 80 per cent of the original cost 
of the goods sold. The sales expenses came to about 10 per cent 
of the money received. 

The War Department did everything in its power to make 
the stores attractive to the public. It stocked them with a wide 
range of articles and advertised them heavily. A press bureau 
was established in Washington, and the newspapers devoted 
acres of space to the publicity. In spite of the propaganda, 
however, the response of the public was not so unrestrained 
as the outcry against the costs of necessaries might have led one 
to expect. (To be sure, the Government, naturally, could not 
set up its stores in the high-rent districts — the districts most 
convenient to the retail customers.) The army retail stores did 
business at the rate of approximately $5,000,000 a month — 
not much for 110,000,000 potential customers. As the sales 
went on it became evident that, although the protest against 
high prices was practically universal, only the thrifty minority 
was willing to step across the line of convenience and custom 
in order to secure lower ones. The rest preferred to grumble and 
follow their lines of least resistance. 

Yet it is probably true that the retail stores benefited all, 



SELLING THE SURPLUS 285 

since the continued sale of great quantities of surplus military 
supplies at reduced prices doubtless had an effect in bringing 
down commercial prices. Although only some 350 items in 
the Army's supply list were applicable to retail selling, this 
range, after all, was considerable. In the subsistence list it ran 
from Apples, Evaporated, to Vinegar, and in general supplies 
from Arctics, Cloth Top, to Whips, Artillery. The Surplus 
Property Division even sold a few motorcycles at the stores. 

Far overshadowing the retail sales in quantities of goods 
moved were the sales to jobbers, dealers, and speculators, by 
informal bids on advertised lists of supplies. The sales head- 
quarters in Washington and the zone offices became busy 
markets for months after the armistice as the War Department 
got rid of the surplus supplies procured by the Director of 
Purchase. As stated, there were regular commodity days — 
textiles were sold on Mondays, raw materials on Tuesdays, 
and so on. At the Monday sales the Surplus Property Division 
had taken in, by February 20, 1920, nearly $66,000,000 paid 
for clothing and equipage alone. These sales benefited the gen- 
eral public in that they usually resulted in the goods being 
sold at retail by salvage companies or by regular mercantile 
houses at reduced prices. 

The fluctuations of markets sometimes made it possible for 
the Government to sell surplus to bidders at a profit. For 
instance, a ton or more of camphor, acquired originally for the 
Medical Department, brought a profit of 84 per cent, due to 
a post-armistice increase in the price of camphor. Medical sup- 
plies generally, although they were sold principally to public 
institutions, brought a 99-per-cent recovery of their war 
cost. General supplies — including hardware, kitchen utensils, 
brushes and brooms, rope, paper, office furniture, musical in- 
struments, and athletic goods — sold at prices which brought 
back to the Government more than 72 per cent of their war 
cost. 

Apparently useless supplies — useless to civilians, that is — 
were purchased by bidders who had found unique uses for 
them. The nonbreakable eyepieces of gas masks were found to 



286 DEMOBILIZATION 

manufacture well into motorists' goggles. The anti-dim paste 
used to keep the gas-mask eyepieces from fogging from the 
wearers' breath had a practical use upon the windshields of 
automobiles during rainstorms. Trench fans were bought and 
used as aprons for cannery workers. 

Surplus leather was sold in auctions held in Philadelphia, 
Chicago, San Francisco, Boston, and elsewhere; and the cash 
recoveries generally were large, ranging from 71 per cent to 
100 per cent of the war cost, and even, in instances, returning 
a profit. Harness did not sell well, because much of it was 
made of russet leather, which does not attract the commercial 
buyer, or else because the harnesses were of special designs not 
used by teamsters. 

The demands of other departments of the Government for 
surplus army motor trucks were so great that only a few were 
sold as surplus, and those few were neither new nor in good 
condition. Automobile tires, however, were placed on sale in 
the retail stores. 

The total sale of surplus materials acquired by the Division 
of Purchase, Storage, and Traffic amounted to $357,000,000 
between the date of the armistice and January 31, 1920. The 
recovery was 77.57 per cent of the original cost. 



\ 



K 



CHAPTER XVIII 

THE FOREIGN LIQUIDATION 

■ — \ 
LTHOUGH as these words are written it is more than \ 

two and a half years since the armistice of November, J 
11, 1918, was signed, it is still impossible to give a 
clean-cut and definitive statement of the accomplishments of 
the industrial demobilization. It may never be possible to do 
so. Although in the main it was possible to terminate the war 
contracts with supplementary agreements fixing the Govern- 
ment's liability to the penny, the consolidation of these agree- 
ments would not give the full cost of the tennination. A few 
claimants are stubborn and insist upon the ultimate legal re- 
dress guaranteed them by the terms of their contracts. The 
administration in Washington has changed, and some few of 
the claims once settled — as it was believed, finally — are being 
reopened. And then, on the credit side of the war ledger there 
is the same indefiniteness. Surpluses of war supplies are in- 1 
determinate — expanding or contracting as policies change, as > 
the military establishment finds need of materials once de- ' 
Glared surplus, as war reserves deteriorate. Thus it is impossible 
to draw a line and say that all transactions on the one side 
should be entered in the war account and all on the other in the 
account of the permanent Army. 

But in one important branch of our war industry there was 
a complete, definite liquidation. The red line was drawn and 
the balance struck. This was the branch in which the Allies 
and other foreign nations were participants, as either buyers 
or sellers. The promptness with which this transaction was 
consummated, and the completeness of it — down to the last 
dollar due, down to the last pound of materials exchanged — 
mark it as one of the outstanding accomplishments in the whole 
industrial record of the war. Its benefits to the countries 



288 DEMOBILIZATION 

affected are not to be read entirely in the footings of the 
columns of debits and offsets: rather, they are political and 
economic — the prestige of the United States enhanced, inter- 
national good will sustained, irritation and ill feeling, which 
might easily have been aroused among the late Allies and their 
associates in the settlement of their business arrangements, 
avoided. 

It is evident that these war transactions fell into two classes : 
one class in which the Allies dealt (through the American 
Government) with American industry for the production of 
supplies; the other in which the United States was the cus- 
tomer, and the industries of the Allies (and to a slight extent 
the industries of certain neutral nations) the source of supply. 
And, as the business of terminating the arrangements was thus 
a double-barreled proposition, the War Department found it 
convenient to attack it with two agencies : the so-called Cuthell 
Board (which, officially speaking, was the "Special Represen- 
tative of the Secretary of War" and his assistants) and the 
United States Liquidation Commission. 

Mr. Chester W. Cuthell was the Special Representative of 
the Secretary of War. His Board consisted of lawyers and ac- 
countants whom he chose and appointed. The duties of Mr. 
Cuthell and his Board were to terminate and settle up the war 
business of the Allies in the United States under those arrange- 
ments in which the War Department had been a participant, 
whether as agent, producer, or partner. The Board was there- 
fore essentially the agency for liquidating the international 
lousiness on this side of the Atlantic. The United States Liqui- 
dation Commission, on the other hand, was the agency created 
to liquidate America's war industry abroad ; and this was much 
the greater of the two tasks. The United States Liquidation 
Commission was charged, also, with an added duty: that of 
disposing of all American surplus military property on foreign 
soil. 

We must think of both these activities in international de- 
mobilization as going on simultaneously, as they did. The two 
agencies were created almost at the same time: Mr. Cuthell 



THE FOREIGN LIQUIDATION 289 

was appointed on January 22, 1919, and the United States / 
Liquidation Commission was created on the following Febru- 
ary 1 1 . Also it was necessary that they both work in the closest— 4 
contact and cooperation with each other, since the arrange- 
ments of both would have to come together in the final settle- 
ments, the American claims against the Allies, as substan- 
tiated by the Board, going to offset the Allied claims against 
us, as acknowledged by the Liquidation Commission. This 
liaison and harmony existed. The cooperation, too, extended 
to the adoption of certain broad policies which were to be fol- 
lowed by both in liquidating the business. One of these, and 
perhaps the most important one, was that, in the negotiations 
that were to follow, no nation should expect to profit at the 
expense of any of the others. The settlements should be made 
on the basis of actual cost. A second policy was that interna- 
tional agreements and understandings, even though they had 
never been committed formally to writing, were to have the 
binding force of formal contracts. In other words, the business 
would be settled as among partners and friends, no one of 
whom wished to take advantage of the others. 

Upon both liquidating agencies bore the need for haste in 
terminating the business. Armies were demobilizing, personnel 
familiar with the subjects in negotiation melting away. If the 
discussions were to be long protracted they would take on the 
aspect of contentions, with evidence and affidavits to be se- 
cured, inventories and audits taken, hearings conducted, ex- 
amination and cross-examination of witnesses, causes perhaps 
finally going into international tribunals or before commissions 
of arbitration. Nothing but ill feeling could result from such 
an outcome. The international business relations had become 
enormously intricate during the war. It was obviously an im- 
practical thing to go into details, as a creditor might attack 
the schedules of a bankrupt corporation. Such procedure would 
drag along for years. It was to the advantage of every party to 
the transactions, the parties being sovereign nations having 
regard for their international contacts, to give and take in 
rough bargaining, accepting estimates and lump sums rather 



290 DEMOBILIZATION 

than insisting upon items and particulars, and finally to agree 
to totals which at the best would be only approximations. The 
important thing was to get the business over with justice 
done to all. 

That was the spirit in which both boards worked. 

Mr. Cuthell, upon his appointment, found in the Division 
of Purchase, Storage, and Traffic a consolidated and condensed 
record of every claim held by the War Department against the 
governments associated with us in the war. This showed him 
the field. He discovered, however, that none of the war mis- 
sions maintained by the Allies in the United States was vested 
with power to adjust and settle these claims, many of which 
were disputed. Therefore, while his hastily gathered force of 
experts was preparing the claims for presentation, Mr. Cuth- 
ell himself (in April, 1919) was sent to Europe to ask the 
foreign governments concerned to create liquidating agencies 
competent to deal with the United States and, further, to re- 
tain in their respective services, until the liquidation should be 
effected, the officers familiar with the American transactions. 

It should be noted here that this was a wide departure from 
international precedent. Ordinarily, financial claims between 
nations are settled by the slow and cumbersome processes of 
diplomatic interchange, or else by arbitration. To have allowed 
the war claims to go into this channel would possibly have 
meant the end of the amity between the Allies and the United 
States. Our liquidation agencies proposed direct dealing 
through business plenipotentiaries, with restrictions even less 
exacting than would be drawn by two private corporations. 

In Paris Mr. Cuthell found representatives of Italy pre- 
pared to discuss the American claims against Italy. Soon after 
the conferences started, however, President Wilson made pub- 
lic at the Peace Conference his attitude toward the Italian 
occupation of the Adriatic port of Fiume; and the Italian 
delegation, including those ready to negotiate a business settle- 
ment with us, withdrew from Paris. 

Mr. Cuthell thereupon went to London to negotiate with 
the British. The British Government appointed and em- 



f THE FOREIGN LIQUIDATION 291 

powered a special commission, headed by Lord Inverforth, 
then the British Minister of Munitions, and including several 
eminent representatives of the British Government, among 
them Mr. W. T. Layton, a man of unusual ability and the one 
who took the actual lead for the British in the subsequent nego- 
tiations, to deal with the American claims. Meanwhile Mr. 
Cuthell's principal assistants had arrived from the United 
States, bringing with them the now formulated statements 
analyzing the British war business in America and setting 
forth what our negotiators regarded as the proper charges for 
the British to pay in settlement. These assistants were Mr. 
Ralph W. Gwinn, who was to present the Liberty engine case ; 
Mr. Miller D. Steever, in charge of the airplane lumber claim; 
and Mr. F. C. Weems, who had prepared the smokeless powder 
and cotton linters cases. The conferences began immediately, 
and such was the progress made that within ten days a com- 
plete agreement was reached, and the British war business in 
the United States was definitely terminated. The so-called 
Cuthell-Inverforth Agreement, which embodied the terms of 
settlement, was dated May 10, 1919. 

The agreement, reached so speedily and with such complete 
mutual accord, terminated a vast business within the United 
States. From the United States as dealer, Great Britain had 
procured smokeless powder, picric acid, airplane lumber, and 
Liberty engines. As a partner of the United States, Great 
Britain participated in the pool of cotton linters which cor- 
nered the entire American supply for the benefit of the powder 
mills. England was also a partner with us in the project to 
build a chain of chemical factories in America to produce 
acetone, used in making dope for airplane wings. These fac- 
tories never came into production, and the project was closed 
out with a loss of over $6,000,000, half of which loss the 
British were bound to share. We participated with England in 
the purchase of Australasian wool. The terms under which the 
wool contract was closed out were noted in a previous chapter 
of this volume. 

The celerity with which these complicated war transactions 



292 DEMOBILIZATION 

were terminated was a distinct triumph in international nego- 
tiation. The British, when they entered the conferences, prob- 
ably had no idea that they were to be rushed through to any 
such speedy conclusion. The conferences, in fact, began as if 
they were to drag along for an extended time. On the first day 
Mr. Gwinn gave a careful and clear exposition of the Liberty 
engine case, setting forth in detail just what we had done and 
to what extent the British ought to participate in the costs. 
Although, whenever any of his figures were challenged, the 
American delegation proceeded then and there to make adjust- 
ments apparently to the satisfaction of the British commis- 
sioners, yet when Mr. Gwinn had concluded, the Americans 
were unable to gain from the British any expression of opinion 
as to whether the total would be accepted, at least tentatively, 
as the British obligation. It was evident that the British ex- 
pected to prepare and, later on, press an argument against the 
American statement. If this procedure were to be followed 
throughout the negotiations, it would be many weeks before 
the conferees could reach any final agreement. 

This outcome of the first day's negotiation was a disappoint- 
ment to the Americans, but they determined to try again next 
day. The next morning Mr, Steever took up the airplane 
lumber case, and talked for nearly four hours. He went into a 
description of the picturesque phases of the northwestern 
lumbering enterprise — the felling of the spruce trees, the steel 
cables on which the great trunks slid down the mountain sides, 
the railroads built into hitherto inaccessible wildernesses. But 
punctuating his rhetoric were the hard figures of costs, expendi- 
tures, losses, deliveries, and values. The British had shared in 
this whole enterprise in the Pacific Northwest, the develop- 
ment of which had never reached the stage of turning out the 
airplane lumber at low prices. As Mr. Steever talked he invited 
interruption and objection, and the British delegates availed 
themselves of the invitation. The various objections were re- 
solved as the case was unfolded. At the conclusion Mr. Cuthell 
asked for any further objections to the statement. But the 
British had exhausted their challenges during the presentation 



THE FOREIGN LIQUIDATION 293 

of the claim. The only objection raised was to British partici- 
pation in the cost of certain dry kilns in which the export 
airplane lumber was not treated. This item was promptly sub- 
tracted from the claim's total, and then Mr. Cuthell briefly 
urged that the column's footing be accepted tentatively as the 
British obligation. If not to the surprise of the Americans, cer- 
tainly to their extreme gratification, the British commission 
agreed. 

That was the real victory, for it set the precedent for the 
entire settlement. Each day the Americans presented a new 
case; and each evening when the American representatives 
left the Hotel Metropole in London, where the conferences 
were held, a tentative agreement in that case had been reached. 
Finally all the claims were settled tentatively, except the 
Liberty engine claim. Once more the Americans pressed to have 
the original statement accepted, and it was. It was understood, 
however, that all figures were to be subject to verification by 
a British audit of the books of the War Department in Wash- 
ington. 

On the tenth day the Americans brought to the Metropole 
a tentative written agreement, embodying all the sub-settle- 
ments agreed upon. Mr. Cuthell then pointed out the consider- 
able cost of a British audit of our books, the possibilities of 
friction arising over the presence of British auditors in our War 
Department over an extended period, and the likelihood, since 
all the American estimates were conservative, that the audit 
would not in any event greatly change the amount of the 
British obligation and might even increase it ; and he suggested 
that it would be good policy for the British to accept the tenta- 
tive figure as final and let it go at that. Lord Inverforth 
promptly agreed. That was cricket, as the English say. 

The agreement fixed the cash liability of the British Gov- 
ernment for its unpaid American war bills and its obligations 
arising from the termination of its American contracts and 
engagements at $35,464,823.10. Of this the Liberty engine 
item was the largest item — approximately $14,000,000. The 
British paid over $13,000,000 to satisfy all claims of the 



294 DEMOBILIZATION 

United States arising from the British purchases of airplane 
spruce, iir, and cedar. Its powder contracts accounted for 
nearly $4,700,000 of the settlement sum, wood distillates 
(principally acetone) for about $2,900,000, and its 2-per-cent 
share in the linters pool for the rest. 

Practically all the settlements made by the Cuthell Board 
were carried as offsets to the American liabilities under the 
general foreign liquidation accomplished by the United States 
Liquidation Commission; but the British preferred to make 
their settlements separate transactions. Accordingly, on August 
2, 1919, a representative of the British Treasury delivered to 
the War Department a check in payment of the British obliga- 
tion under the terms of the Cuthell-Inverforth Agreement. 
This, however, was not a complete termination for Great 
Britain. That Government admitted full liability under 
numerous other, but small, claims which the War Department 
had not yet had time to prepare in detail. As invoices were 
subsequently presented to the British Government, these claims ' 
were promptly paid. The minor cases came to approximately 
$7,000,000. 

Progress almost equally swift was made by the Cuthell 
Board in securing a settlement of the American claims against 
France. At first there was no official French agency empowered 
to make such a settlement. Mr. Cuthell and his assistants pro- 
ceeded immediately to Paris after making the British agree- 
ment and importuned the French Government to designate a 
representative competent to conclude a settlement. There they 
were joined by Messrs. Charles B. Shelton, William Fisher, 
John H. Ray, Jr., and Harry A. Fisher, who brought with 
them from Washington the formulated statements of various 
American claims against the French. After several days' delay 
Premier Clemenceau appointed the French Liquidation Com- 
mission, headed by M. Edouard de Billy, who had been with 
the French High Commission in Washington during the war 
and was therefore familiar with the French contracts in the 
United States. To France the War Department had sold 
picric acid, cotton linters, smokeless powder, airplane lumber, 



THE FOREIGN LIQUIDATION 295 

and Liberty engines. The French liability in these cases was 
finally fixed at $95,968,561.87, and a formal agreement ad- 
mitting the liability was signed on May 29, 1919. There were 
other considerable claims against France, the statements of 
which had not yet been prepared. Later (September 9, 1919) 
Mr. Cuthell came to an agreement with M. Casenave, minister 
plenipotentiary of France in the United States, whereby the 
French admitted an additional liability of $64,910,352.92. Of 
this sum, $38,000,000 represented ocean freight charges upon 
war supplies bought by France in the United States and carried 
to France in American army cargo transports. 

Two additional settlements with France, one terminating 
the French contract with J. G. White & Company for raw 
materials for airplane manufacture and the other terminating 
the French contract with the General Vehicle Company for the 
production of Gnome rotary airplane engines, increased the 
French liability by $2,117,785.34. These settlements were 
made in France by Mr. Monte Appel, chief assistant to Mr. 
Cuthell. The total liability arising from the American war 
business of France was therefore $162,996,700.13. This sum 
went into the general settlement agreement made with the 
French by the United States Liquidation Commission. 

Soon after the French settlement was a fact, the Italian 
Government appointed a commission to treat with the Cuthell 
Board. The Italian agreement, dated August 13, 1919, ad- 
mitted an obligation on the part of Italy in the sum of $5,200,- 
000, representing Italian war purchases of picric acid, smoke- 
less powder, airplane lumber, linters, and trinitrotoluol, this 
agreement not including an admitted obligation of approxi- 
mately $395,000 for Liberty engines, clothing, and other small 
items not yet invoiced. Against this obligation Italy presented 
a claim for $4,053,073 for the overseas transportation of 
American troops on Italian ships. The Italian Government 
paid the difference, namely, $1,146,927 to the War Depart- 
ment on September 26, 1919, and also paid the minor claims 
as they were presented. 

Minor claims against the governments of Belgium, Brazil, 



296 DEMOBILIZATION 

Canada, Cuba, and Czecho-Slovakia, to the total of $4,709,- 
330.89, were presented by the Cuthell Board and paid by the 
governments concerned. 

While the Cuthell Board was engaged in rendering the bills 
to the Allies for supplies purchased by them in America and 
collecting the money on those bills, — and here let it be said that 
the collections were greater in aggregate amount than the total 
sum involved in all the claims for or against the United States 
prosecuted or resisted by the nation's official diplomacy from 
the beginning of our national existence up to the outbreak of 
the war in Europe; international transactions which included 
the Louisiana Purchase, the purchase of Alaska, and the pur- 
chase of the Canal Zone, — all the while that Mr. Cuthell and 
his associates were collecting money for Uncle Sam, the United 
States Liquidation Commission was busy adjusting the fit of 
the shoe on the old gentleman's other foot. In other words, the 
Commission was paying the war bills owed by the United 
States to the Allies. This was a business equally great and even 
more important. 

There was some question whether the President, with all his 
war powers, could legally empower boards and commissions to 
conclude international settlements involving the passing of 
money, since such power resided only in the State Department, 
the acts of which had to be ratified by Congress before they 
were binding upon the United States. The Cuthell Board and 
the United States Liquidation Commission were actually 
created in January and February, 1919; but to remove any 
doubt as to the binding force of their settlements, Congress, 
on March 2, 1919, passed an act empowering the Secretary of 
War to settle, through any agency he might set up, all inter- 
national war claims in which the War Department was 
K involved. 

The Secretary of War appointed Mr. Edwin B. Parker 
chairman of the United States Liquidation Commission. As 
members he appointed Brigadier General Charles G. Dawes, 
Mr. Homer H. Johnson, and Hon. Henry F. Hollis. During 



THE FOREIGN LIQUIDATION 297 

the active part of the war Judge Parker had held the im- 
portant post of priorities commissioner of the War Industries 
Board. General Dawes, in private life a Chicago banker, had 
been General Purchasing Agent of the A. E. F. In 1920 he 
sprang into national prominence when, as a witness before a 
congressional investigating committee, in vigorous and uncon- 
ventional style he defended the material transactions of the 
A. E. F. and denounced those critics who, in searching for 
waste and lavish expenditure, evidently overlooked the fact 
that the prime purpose of the A. E. F. was to defeat a danger- 
ous enemy on the field of battle. His striking utterances on 
that occasion did more than reams of printed propaganda to 
reconcile the American public to the inevitable wastes of the 
war. President Harding soon afterwards appointed "Hell and 
Maria" Dawes, as he had come to be known, federal budget 
commissioner, thus placing him in charge of the most important 
attempt at economy in national expenditures which the United 
States had ever made. Mr. Johnson was an able and well- 
known lawyer of Cleveland. Mr. Hollis was a former United 
States senator from New Hampshire. 

When the Liquidation Commission reached France and 
organized for work about March 1, 1919, it found the ground 
well prepared for it. Mr. Edward R. Stettinius, the well- 
known New York financier, had been sent to France in July, 

1918, as a special representative of the Secretary of War to 
act as a sort of surveyor-general over the war industry result- 
ing from the foreign orders placed by the American Expedi- 
tionary Forces. Mr. Stettinius found that a considerable part 
of the munitions being procured abroad was being produced 
and delivered under informal and more or less vague agree- 
ments and understandings. Before the armistice Mr. Stettinius 
had done his best to reduce some of the more important of these 
understandings to the form of written, definite contracts. 
Promptly after the armistice he took steps to cancel all further 
production for the Americans and then began the negotiations 
leading to the settlements. Mr. Stettinius resigned in January, 

1919, and the United States Liquidation Commission inherited 



298 DEMOBILIZATION 

these various negotiations in the stages at which Mr. Stettinius 
left them. 

Although, as we have said, the characteristic note of our 
industrial demobilization abroad was outright cancellation of 
contracts and the payment of indemnities, the policy was not 
maintained consistently. There were several important excep- 
tions, and one of these was the method adopted in terminating 
the British manufacture of artillery and shell for the A. E. F. 
The numerous orders, contracts, and agreements placed and 
made by the A. E. F. for the delivery of British artillery and 
ammunition were consolidated, on October 19, 1918, by Mr. 
Stettinius in conference with Mr. Winston Churchill, then the 
British Minister of Munitions, into a single formal agreement. 
In terminating this contract after the armistice Mr. Stettinius 
assumed that it would be better to accept completed guns and 
ammunition, even though these might be surplus above the 
future requirements of the Army, than to pay heavy cancella- 
tion indemnities and receive nothing in return. Artillery does 
not deteriorate rapidly, either materially or in design. The 
negotiations opened by Mr. Stettinius with the British Govern- 
ment looking to this end were picked up by the Liquidation 
Commission, which, in March, 1919, reached an agreement 
with the British that, in lieu of paying any cancellation dam- 
ages, the United States would accept a limited quantity of 
materiel completed after the armistice under the American 
contract. 

America accordingly accepted the post-armistice delivery of 
498 British-made guns, ranging in model from 60-pounders to 
8-inch howitzers, and 420,000 rounds of ammunition for them. 
For this materiel the American Government paid £6,637,598. i 

A most interesting negotiation conducted by the Liquidation 
Commission for the United States was that which wound up 
the tripartite international project for the construction of 
36-ton tanks, better known as the Anglo-American Mark VIII 
tanks. France was originally a party to this transaction only 
to the extent of agreeing to provide a site for the assembling 
plant in France. England and the United States were equal 



THE FOREIGN LIQUIDATION 299 

partners in the enterprise, England supplying hulls and guns 
and America the power and traction. The French, however, 
were to be permitted to buy tanks at the partnership price ; but 
the French at first did not ask for any, asserting that their own 
light tank production was sufficient for them. 

The plant was built at Chateauroux, Neuvy-Pailloux. 
About the time the project was getting well under way, heavier 
tanks began to demonstrate their effectiveness in the field; 
and then France insisted that, because her armies held the most 
front-line mileage, the most of the Anglo-American tanks to 
be built at the Chateauroux plant should be allotted to her. 
Reluctantly the British agreed that the first 1,200 tanks should 
be divided equally between France and the United States and 
that France should receive all of the next 300. 

Then the war ended. About 24,000,000 francs had been 
invested at Chateauroux. The British had spent £3,000,000 in 
the manufacture of components and the Americans a like sum, 
expressed in dollars. France had not put in a centime; yet she 
had expected to receive nine-sixteenths of the first year's 
output. The question was, what share of the heavy loss should 
France stand"? The French arrangement with the Tank Com- 
mission was tantamount to a contract, with the British-Ameri- 
can partnership standing in the light of contractor. It was 
evident, then, that the French were morally bound to pay can- 
cellation charges — to stand part of the loss, in other words. 
The British and American negotiators at London thought it 
would be about right if France would pay back the 24,000,000 
francs expended by the British and Americans at Chateauroux, 
and the British and Americans would throw in the tank plant 
itself as an inducement. 

Then the question arose, how would this 24,000,000 francs 
be divided'? Both England and America had lost heavily in 
the big-tank enterprise — each had, in fact, agreed to let these 
losses balance each other; neither was to bill the other for 
anything in the settlement — and here seemed to be the chance 
to get some of the money back. Naturally, the Americans 
assumed that the French reimbursement would be divided 



300 DEMOBILIZATION 

equally, since both America and England had contributed 
equally to the cost of the Chateauroux plant. But no, the 
British contended; since they had surrendered their share of 
the first year's production of tanks, the lion's share of the reim- 
bursement should go to them. There was logic in this, but, 
without deciding the point, both sides repaired to Paris to 
present their joint tank claim to the French; and then it ap- 
peared that the British and Americans had been dividing some 
French chickens before they were hatched. Through M. Louis 
Loucheur, the Minister of Munitions, the French Government 
metaphorically lifted its eyebrows in surprise that its associates 
could present such a claim. To be sure, the French expected to 
take the Anglo-American heavy tanks, but so did the Americans 
and British expect to receive light tanks from the French in- 
dustry. These were merely understandings, not formal con- 
tracts; and the French, to do their share, had made large 
expenditures in developing the light-tank manufacture for the 
benefit of all. Needless to say, the French Government had lost 
heavily in terminating its tank industry. These national losses 
should set off each other. . . . 

The British and American representatives retired to ponder 
this rejoinder. It seemed to have merit; yet the fact remained 
that somehow or other France was evidently going to emerge 
from the tank discussion with the Chateauroux plant in her 
possession. The delegates returned and argued with such force 
that the French Government agreed to pay 20,000,000 francs 
in settlement, taking over the Chateauroux plant.* Since the 
salvage value of this plant was estimated at 5,000,000 francs, 
the sum of 1 5,000,000 francs was considered as the indemnity 
paid by France. England then asked for five-sixths of the total 
payment, but the American argument scaled this down to 70 
per cent. America thus received 6,000,000 francs out of the 
settlement. 

The bargaining Yankees, however, were yet to have the final 
word in the tank deal. With the settlement complete, sealed 

* The French Government later converted the plant into a railroad car 
repair shop. 



THE FOREIGN LIQUIDATION 301 

and delivered, the British had on their hands 105 sets of tank 
parts with only junk value, although it had cost the British 
£5,000 a set to manufacture them. The Americans offered 
£1,000 a set for these parts, and the British snapped at the 
offer. This fine bargain enabled us later, at low cost, to 
assemble these parts with the American-built components and 
thus place in the war reserves 100 of the largest and most 
formidable tanks ever built. 

Another, a minor, tank transaction should be noted. The 
British Army had supplied, during the action, sixty-four tanks 
of various sorts to the 301st Tank Battalion of the A. E. F. 
Fifty of these, some of them more or less damaged, had been 
returned to the British after the armistice, and the remaining 
fourteen were shipped to the United States. For the purchase 
of the fourteen and for the war use of the other fifty, the 
Liquidation Commission agreed to pay the British Govern- 
ment the sum of £189,233 2s lid. 

Outside the claims for payment for materials actually de- 
livered, the British pressed upon the Liquidation Commission 
collateral claims of several sorts. One of these was for interest 
upon money invested by the British in stocks of goods destined 
for American consumption. Our people protested successfully 
against paying interest upon such investments, but admitted 
the point that we should pay interest after the goods had been 
delivered and we had been billed, allowing a reasonable inter- 
est-free period for vouchering and checking. Investigation 
showed that both armies had been dilatory in paying their bills 
to each other, and that the average time of delaying payment 
had been five months and a quarter. The British bills against 
America exceeded the American bills against England by some 
£51,000,000. One month and a half was allowed as a reason- 
able interest-free period after billing. Accordingly the com- 
mission agreed to pay 5-per-cent interest on the British billing 
excess, a sum which amounted to £797,854 11s 2d, and this 
America paid.* 

* This sum was much more than offset in our favor by the decline in sterling 
exchange during the time bills were unpaid. 



302 DEMOBILIZATION 

It was impossible for the Liquidation Commission to make 
a lump settlement of all the minor bills, accounts, and claims 
of Great Britain against America, because of the difficulties 
in securing full statements of the indebtedness. It was 
roughly estimated, however, that these claims would aggregate 
£10,000,000. 

One obscure and involved problem for the Commission to 
solve related to the so-called British "hidden losses" on steel 
products sold to the United States during the war. The British 
treatment and control of its war prices differed radically in 
method from ours. The War Industries Board, it will be 
remembered, fixed prices high enough to stimulate production 
and then held the industries to those prices, no matter to whom 
they sold. The British plan was an opposite one. With steel, 
for instance, the British Government simply monopolized the 
raw materials and sold them to the producers at prices that 
represented a loss to the Government. In effect, it was a sub- 
sidy. To the British public it made no difference whether it 
paid this subsidy or an equal amount in the increased cost of 
artillery, ammunition, and other munitions made of steel. But 
when it came to a settlement between England and the United 
States, the British Government insisted that the United States 
was not fairly entitled to the "manufacturers' issues" price for 
the raw steel that went into the British-made munitions sup- 
plied to America. The British, therefore, after the main 
settlements, presented a supplementary claim to compensate 
for the hidden loss, and this claim amounted approximately 
to £3,770,000. 

In principle, the Commission was willing to admit the force 
of the British contention. It asked the British, however, to pre- 
pare a more definite statement, showing ( 1 ) the average Brit- 
ish governmental loss on all steel supplied to manufacturers 
for the year preceding the armistice, (2) the amount of such 
steel that went into products sold to America, and, finally, (3) 
the hidden loss on all steel furnished to America as thus esti- 
mated. When the revised statement was presented, it was 
found to contain items of hidden loss which America could not 



THE FOREIGN LIQUIDATION 303 

possibly allow. The British war subsidies went all through 
their war industry. For instance, in order to stimulate produc- 
tion, the British Government had paid subsidies to the makers 
of silica brick, used in building steel furnaces. The British 
asked us to stand a part of this subsidy, inasmuch as some of 
the shell supplied to us had been produced from furnaces built 
of subsidized brick. The Commission retorted by asking why 
Great Britain did not also ask us to share the subsidy on the 
bread the British steel workers had eaten while they were work- 
ing on the American artillery and shell orders. In other words, 
we were willing to pay hidden losses so long as they were not 
too remotely connected with the American contracts. The Com- 
mission also raised the shrewd question, why, since the British 
were asking us to pay for hidden losses, they did not admit us 
to the benefits of their "hidden profits" — viz.^ the profit taxes 
collected from the British steel manufacturers. 

In the autumn of 1920 General G. W. Burr, the Director 
of Purchase, Storage, and Traffic after the armistice and a 
member of the War Department Claims Board, went to Eng- 
land to close up all the outstanding claims existing between the 
United States and Great Britain as a result of the war. The 
outcome of his negotiations was the Burr-Niemeyer Agreement, 
which tied up all loose ends and brought about a final termina- 
tion of the war business between the two nations. All pending 
claims were brought into one lump-sum settlement, under the 
terms of which the United States paid to Great Britain the 
sum of £2,946,511 2s 8d. This sum settled all the miscella- 
neous and minor claims noted above; settled, too, the debt 
owed by the United States to the British for the maintenance 
of our Siberian Expedition; and settled all other claims, in- 
cluding the hidden-loss claim and a British claim for reim- 
bursement for various "overhead" inspection and storage 
charges. The settlement figure was much under what the 
British had originally claimed. In this settlement the hidden- 
loss and "overhead" claims were paired in a single item which 
accounted for approximately £1,500,000 of the total paid by 



304 DEMOBILIZATION 

the United States. The Burr-Niemeyer Agreement was dated 
November 23, 1920. 

One general claim set up by the British Government against 
the United States the Liquidation Commission rejected. After 
we had paid to Great Britain the bill rendered for the trans- 
portation of our troops and supplies in England, the British 
Government rendered a supplementary bill for the same serv- 
ices. During the war Great Britain gave guaranties of income 
to the British railways, and in settling with the railroads the 
British Government granted to them an increase in military 
passenger rates, an increase which was retroactive to April 1, 
1919. The British asked us to pay our share of the retroactive 
increase. This was refused on the ground that by the same 
token we could hold the British to their share of the loss sus- 
tained by the American Government in its operation of the 
American railroads by the United States Railroad Administra- 
tion, since our roads had hauled great quantities of British 
supplies. To open up closed settlements because of retroactive 
agreements would open up a Pandora's box of troubles for 
both nations. 

Thus the international bargaining went on, back and forth, 
give and take, broad principles of settlement prevailing rather 
than the minute and individual merits of particular items, both 
sides accepting estimates and unaudited totals and each relying 
upon the good faith of the other. Thus this tremendously in- 
volved and intricate business was closed up with dispatch and 
amiability. As a rule the A. E. F. in its purchases had dealt 
with governments, with which such liquidation methods could 
be adopted; but there were a few relatively small contracts 
made directly with private individuals in England, France, 
Italy, Portugal, Spain, and Switzerland. These contracts were 
canceled outright in the full knowledge that we should have 
to pay indemnities. In the settlement of such contracts the 
United States Liquidation Commission acted for the A. E. F. 
much as the War Department Claims Board did for the pro- 
ducing bureaus at home — as a supervisory body, approving the 
settlements made by the various services of the A. E. F. and 



THE FOREIGN LIQUIDATION 305 

paying off the contractors. In all, indemnities were paid for 
the cancellation of some 450 contracts in Europe. In making 
these settlements, the United States benefited greatly by the 
depreciated rates of exchange against the currencies of several 
of these nations, since all indemnities were paid by the United 
States in the currency of the countries in which the claims 
arose. Expressed in dollars at par, it cost the United States 
$3,568,653.23 to cancel the miscellaneous European contracts, 
but the reduced exchange rates effected a considerable saving 
under that figure. 

It is much easier to detect the failings and peculiarities of 
aliens than it is to recognize our own shortcomings; and if 
in these pages we have exulted somewhat over the successes of 
our delegates in checkmating the designs of our European 
associates, this is not to be taken as any boast that we ourselves 
were too disinterested and altruistic to overlook the main 
chance for ourselves. The truth is that, although all the belli- 
gerents were in the field primarily to win a victory of arms, 
not one of them entirely lost contact with the counting room. 
This was clearly shown in the American arrangements for the 
supply of French artillery. 

The numerical expansion of the A. E. F. in the spring and 
summer of 1918 resulted in a greatly increased demand by the 
A. E. F. for French artillery and ammunition. America sup- 
plied schedules of the raw materials which she could furnish, 
and the French made estimates of the numbers of guns they 
could deliver monthly to the A. E. F. But this was all under- 
standing and mutual agreement — no formal contract was 
drawn. When Mr. Stettinius reached Paris in the summer of 
1918, he immediately began to press to get this agreement 
down in black and white, so that America might know exactly 
what her obligations were. At that time, of course, there was 
no thought that the war would end within the year. About 
the 1st of November, however, it became evident that an 
armistice was drawing near, and immediately the Americans 
grew lukewarm on the subject of a formal contract. The reason 
was evident. Under the terms of a formal contract, America's 



3o6 DEMOBILIZATION 

termination obligations would be questions of fact; with the 
affair left as an unwritten agreement, our obligations would be 
questions of equity, to be negotiated, and we were likely to 
emerge from such negotiations in better case financially than 
we should be if held by the set and rigid conditions of a formal 
contract. 

Nevertheless, the United States did not seek to evade its 
just obligations under the French ordnance agreement. France 
had spent large sums of money in expanding the industry to 
take care of the expected American consumption, and the 
money so spent was a proper charge against the United States 
in any settlement. Immediately after the armistice Mr. Stet- 
tinius ordered production stopped on our orders; but this the 
French, for domestic, social, and economic reasons, were unable 
to do; and at first they were inclined to insist that we should 
accept and pay for a large quantity of artillery produced during 
a gradual termination of the industry. Mr. Stettinius success- 
fully maintained the position that this post-armistice produc- 
tion was undertaken purely in pursuance of an internal policy 
of the French Government and that by no stretch of logic 
could it be entered as a proper war charge against the United 
States, Mr. Stettinius then went on to conduct the settlement 
negotiations, and these were about complete when the Liquida- 
tion Commission arrived to inherit the transaction and to draw 
the final settlement contract. 

As in the settlement of the British artillery contract, the 
American negotiators accepted guns and ammunition produced 
after the armistice by the French; and they did it in complete 
consistency with the position and policy defined in the pre- 
ceding paragraph. The armistice found great numbers of 
French guns in process of manufacture for the A. E. F. The 
United States was obligated to accept and pay for this un- 
finished material. After the inventory of it had been taken, the 
Liquidation Commission suggested that in lieu of the unfin- 
ished parts the United States accept their value in full comple- 
tions and that the production of all other guns be canceled 
without charge to the United States. This alternative, allow- 



THE FOREIGN LIQUIDATION 307 

ing, as it did, a measure of post-armistice production in the 
French mills, the French Government quickly accepted and, 
in carrying out the terms of the subsequent settlement contract, 
delivered to the United States 944 75-millimeter gun units, 
700 155-millimeter howitzer units, and 198 155-millimeter 
gun units, all with limbers and with additional parts as spares. 
For these the United States paid 1 17,5:01,887.45 francs. 

The French agreed to a similar plan in canceling the con- 
struction of airplanes and engines for the United States. This 
construction had been undertaken under a formal contract, 
signed by General Pershing. The contract contained no can- 
cellation clause, but the French Government had provided for 
cancellation in its subcontracts with the French producers. 
Under the terms of the contract large numbers of airplane 
cellules (airplanes without engines), engines, and other aero- 
nautical supplies were in production on the day of the armi- 
stice. In lieu of unfinished parts, the French agreed to deliver 
their equivalent (in value) in finished equipment. Under a 
preliminary agreement the United States acknowledged a can- 
cellation debt of 167,667,761 francs. Of this, about 23,000,- 
000 francs represented cancellation charges and the rest money 
to be paid for completed materials, the schedule of which in- 
cluded 3,568 cellules and 3,979 engines. This preliminary 
agreement, however, was modified later by the French Liberty 
engine settlement negotiated by the Cuthell Board. Under this 
settlement France agreed to accept and pay for Liberty engines 
still to be delivered, to the value of $19,530,000, and in addi- 
tion to pay nearly $2,000,000 in cancellation indemnities. 

This, then, was the situation. We were bound to accept and 
pay for a large number of French airplanes and engines which 
we did not need. The French were bound to accept and pay 
for a large number of Liberty engines which they did not need. 
We could, however, use some of the French planes and engines, 
and the French wanted 500 Liberty engines. Therefore we 
agreed to deliver the 500 engines and to accept French mate- 
rials up to their value, and then to offset the excess number of 
Liberties provided for in the engine settlement agreement 



3o8 DEMOBILIZATION 

against the excess of French air materials named in the French 
aircraft settlement contract. This left a surplus of Liberty- 
engines with the A. E. F., but these were delivered to the 
British to fulfill our obligations under the British Liberty- 
engine settlement; and a few of the engines were sold to 
Poland. 

The settlement with France for our use of her railroads 
during the war was so complicated that it would not be 
profitable to go into the details here. The intricacy of the 
problem was due to the fact that, while 2,000,000 Americans 
in France had used the French railroads for every transporta- 
tion need, — and our forces fought farther from their expedi- 
tionary bases than did any other army in France, — we, in turn, 
had supplied to the French railroads locomotives, cars, crews, 
repairing, coal, track construction, and many other items. The 
Liquidation Commission itself did not attempt to go into these 
details, but turned the whole transaction over to a special 
section headed by Colonel F. A. Delano, the Deputy Director 
General of Transportation for the A. E. F., who had formerly 
been president of the Wabash Railroad and a member of the 
Federal Reserve Board. The upshot of the settlement was that 
we acknowledged a debt to France of 434,985,399.73 francs 
after all our claims had been set off against the French claim. 

The United States Liquidation Commission agreed to pay 
to the French Government the sum of 3,000,000 francs for 
port dues assessed against our vessels for their use of French 
ports during the war. 

When these and other subsidiary questions of settlement 
had been decided and the proper credits established by agree- 
ment in each instance, the United States Liquidation Com- 
mission took up the task of a general blanket settlement of the 
business relations between France and the United States 
during the war. This was a long and involved work; but, since 
the major items in the settlement had already been determined, 
there was little difficulty in securing an agreement. The Gen- 
eral Settlement was dated November 25, 1919. It embraced 
all transactions between the two nations from April 6, 1917, 



THE FOREIGN LIQUIDATION 309 

to August 20, 1919, except (1) France's purchases of our 
surplus military property, (2) the railroad transportation and 
the port dues settlements noted above, and (3) France's claim 
arising from the overseas transportation of American troops in 
French transports. The sum total of the other claims showed 
that the United States owed France 1,488,619,027.52 francs 
and that France owed the United States $177,149,866.86. 
The rate of exchange and form of payment were left to future 
negotiations by the United States Treasury ; but, assuming that 
francs were worth ten to the dollar, the net balance in favor of 
the United States was about $28,000,000. 

We are not yet ready, however, to determine the net finan- 
cial result of the international war business relations in which 
America was a participant. There was still the money to be 
realized from the sale of our surplus military property abroad. 
It will be remembered that one of the two functions of the 
United States Liquidation Commission was to dispose of the 
expeditionary property. Out of the sales transactions arose the 
largest single credit to the account of the United States on 
the international ledger: the proceeds from the bulk sale of 
A. E. F. installations and supplies to the French Government. 

The arguments sustaining the wisdom of a bulk sale of the 
expeditionary property have already been sufficiently re- 
hearsed in this volume. The first step on our part leading to 
the negotiations was to take an inventory of the entire prop- 
erty. The difficulty encountered then may be deduced from 
the fact that the French and the British, whose surpluses were 
not inordinately greater than ours, never even attempted such 
an inventory of their own property. The A. E. F. was a going 
concern, continually drawing from the stocks on hand, and its 
personnel was shifting and diminishing. Nevertheless, by a 
strong force of men, under the direction of Colonel J. H. Gra- 
ham, Engineer Corps, in six weeks of day and night work, such 
an inventory was taken, the property being divided into eight- 
een categories, as follows: 1. Clothing and textiles; 2. Sub- 
sistence supplies; 3. Kitchen utensils and household furnish- 
ings; 4. Machinery, metals, tools, and hardware; 5. Building 



3 1 o DEMOBILIZATION 

materials; 6. Forest products; 7. Railway and dock equip- 
ment; 8. Transport equipment (trucks, motor cars, motor- 
cycles, wagons, horses and mules, etc.); 9. Hospital supplies, 
toilet supplies, and chemicals; 10. Photographic, measuring, 
and musical instruments; 11. Electrical equipment; 12. Oils, 
gasoline, and paints; 13. Ordnance and gas-warfare equip- 
ment; 14. Blasting apparatus and supplies; 15. Printing 
machinery and supplies; 16. Office fixtures, stationery, and 
supplies; 17. Hides and leather; 18. Aeronautical equipment. 

These eighteen categories included only the movable prop- 
erty of the A. E. F. There were still to be considered the 
fixed installations — the barracks, camps, hospitals, warehouses, 
docks, railroad yards, buildings of almost every conceivable 
type. Judge Parker, the chairman of the Commission, cabled 
to France, before he sailed for Europe, a direction that the 
installations be inventoried and appraised. This work was first 
undertaken by Colonel Graham, who later, after he took charge 
of the inventory of movables, was succeeded by Brigadier 
General Edgar Jadwin, whose subsequent appraisal was known 
as the Jadwin Report. It showed the war cost of construction 
to have been $165,661,000, the normal cost $81,543,000, and 
the armistice value $39,256,000. As a matter of fact, any sum 
obtainable for the installations was clear gain, since the salvage 
value of the structures would not have paid the cost of dis- 
mantling (assuming that this work would have required the 
labor of 40,000 men for seven months), the ground rentals, 
and the costs of restoring the sites to their original condition. 

Then arose the determination of the "utilization value" of 
the movable stocJks. This was estimated by taking the war cost 
of production, plus the cost of freighting the goods to France, 
and subtracting various estimated allowances — for natural 
deterioration, for expected losses from fire, theft, and other 
causes, for the saving to the United States in costs of merchan- 
dizing, labor, storage, insurance, interest on investment, and 
other overhead expense obviated by a possible bulk sale, for 
the fact that the stocks were widely scattered and had to be 
collected to be of use. The Commission consolidated these sub- 




Photo by Howard E. Coffin 

WRECK OF COAL MINE AT LENS 




Photo by Signal Corps 

MOTOR TRANSPORT SALVAGE IN FRANCE 




From a photograph taken in France 

INTERALLIED PURCHASERS 

Left to right: Louis Loucheur, French Minister of Munitions; Winston 
Churchill, British Minister of Munitions ; David Lloyd-George, Prime 
Minister of England ; and Bernard M. Baruch, Chairman of the War 
Industries Board. 



THE FOREIGN LIQUIDATION 311 

tractions into a lump deduction of 25 per cent of the estimated 
value. Thus determined, the utilization value of both installa- 
tions and movables was set at $562,230,800 ; and this was the 
figure carried by the Commission into the negotiations with 
the French. 

The French Government designated M. Paul Morel, the 
French Undersecretary of Finance for the Liquidation of War 
Stocks, to represent it in the negotiations with the Commission. 
On April 7, 1919, it was agreed in principle that France would 
buy the American installations^ at any rate, at a price still 
to be fixed, the French assuming all charges and claims against 
the installations. The French were not so sure about the mov- 
ables. M. Morel first proposed that the French Government 
pick out what it wanted and negotiate a price for the selection. 
But this would have skimmed the cream of the American 
property and left the A. E. F. with large quantities of unsal- 
able materials which in all likelihood would eventually have 
become fuel for bonfires. This proposal was therefore rejected, 
and the French representatives were urged as a duty to buy 
all the movables in bulk, since the French people could use 
practically all the supplies. M. Morel, after consultation with 
his principals, eventually agreed to buy all the stocks at a 
price to be fixed. 

Came the question then of the price. M. Morel's first bid 
was 1,500,000,000 francs. Reckoning the value of francs then 
at ten to the dollar, that was an offer of $150,000,000, an offer 
firmly rejected. This was followed by other offers which our 
representatives could not entertain. The negotiations, which 
had begun early in April, continued throughout the spring and 
the fore part of the summer. M. Andre Tardieu and other emi- 
nent Frenchmen entered the conferences in July. On July 24 
a tentative agreement was reached, and its terms were prac- 
tically those of the bulk-sale contract, which was dated 
August 1, 1919. 

France paid $400,000,000 for the property, the United 
States accepting in payment interest-bearing 10-year French 
bonds. Not all the property listed in the original inventory was 



3 1 2 DEMOBILIZATION 

involved in the sale. America made certain exceptions : ( i ) all 
animals (these were sold separately for a total of $29,016,- 
506.59) ; (2) supplies previously sold out of the surplus stocks 
to France herself and other buyers to the value of $77,265,- 
597.83; (3) military equipment returned to the United States,' 
valued at $15,000,000; (4) supplies needed for the mainte- 
nance of the remnant of the A. E. F., worth $4,000,000; and 
(5) supplies worth $10,000,000 turned over to the American 
Red Cross as a gift. Thus, the utilization value of the original 
inventory was scaled down by these subtractions to approxi- 
mately $427,000,000, and for this quantity the French Gov- 
ernment paid ^400,000,000 — a fair return. It should be noted 
that in paying this price the French Government also canceled 
its claim for the payment of customs duties on the goods, and 
a conservative estimate placed the aggregate amount of these 
unpaid duties at $150,000,000. An even greater benefit to us 
was the fact that by the terms of the settlement France as- 
sumed all land claims which might otherwise have been pressed 
upon the United States by French nationals for years to come. 
The bulk sale to France was the largest single transaction 
in the disposition of the A. E. F. surplus ; but there were many 
other sales, some of them large. Goods went in these transac- 
tions to the governments of the Allies (France herself, outside 
the general sale, being a purchaser to the extent of $95,000,- 
000), to individuals, companies, and syndicates in western 
Europe, to relief societies, to cooperative societies in the Bal- 
kans (these, being the economic organization of whole peoples, 
were not affected by political changes and, sometimes seemed to 
have greater stability than the new governments themselves), 
to the governments of the so-called "liberated nations," and 
to other purchasers. Although the United States Liquidation 
Commission made every effort to keep each transaction on the 
dollar basis, it was not always possible to do so, and payments 
were accepted in pounds sterling, in francs, in marks, and in 
other European currency, sometimes much depreciated. Yet, 
translating foreign money into terms of the dollar at average 
rates of exchange, and adding in the $400,000,000 received 



THE FOREIGN LIQUIDATION 313 

from France, we reach a total of approximately $800,000,000 
received by the United States for the entire quantity of Ameri- 
can military property left in Europe after the return of the 
expedition. It is roughly estimated that the property thus sold 
cost the United States $1,328,000,000. The salvage return, 
therefore, was practically 60 per cent of the cost. The mis- 
cellaneous sales transactions have practically all been closed, 
and the receipts have been covered into the Treasury. The 
French $400,000,000 is represented by bonds maturing in 
1929. 

The two blanket transactions with France — the bulk sale of 
buildings and supplies and the general settlement of claims — 
were of great value to the United States in relieving this nation 
of the responsibility of having to deal with individual French 
♦claimants. In taking over all the A. E. F. installations the 
French Government agreed to hold the United States harmless 
from all claims for property damage and restoration. In the 
general settlement the French Government assumed responsi- 
bility for all other claims of French nationals against the 
United States and agreed to settle with the claimants. If, 
however, the claims paid by France exceed 12,000,000 francs, 
America is bound to pay the excess up to 6,000,000 francs. 
Except for this arrangement, the American Government would 
have had to maintain in France for years an organization for 
dealing with French individuals' claims. 

We are now in position to see in close approximation the 
financial result to the United States of the international war 
business. On the credit side we have the Cuthell settlements, 
amounting to $48,716,080.99 in all — this figure, however, not 
including the Cuthell Board's settlement with the French, the 
debt of France on her American war contracts being carried 
over into the general settlement effected by the United States 
Liquidation Commission. We have, as a further credit, the 
6,000,000 francs which were the American share of the French 
payment in the liquidation of the Anglo-American heavy tank 
project. Finally, the general settlement of the Liquidation 



3 14 DEMOBILIZATION 

Commission with the French Government brought to the Treas- 
ury the further sum of $28,000,000. To all these credits must 
be added the $800,000,000 received from the sale of the 
A. E. F. property. The sum of all the American credits 
(counting ten francs as a dollar) is approximately $877,- 
000,000. 

From this credit, however, we must subtract, first, £17,726,- 
685 13s 13d as the American obligation embodied in the ter- 
mination contracts made with the British Government by the 
Liquidation Commission, and £2,946,511 2s 8d as our debt 
to England under the Burr-Niemeyer Agreement. We must 
subtract also the $3,568,653.23 paid by the A. E. F. in can- 
cellation charges to individual European contractors. A final 
subtraction is the 437,985,399.73 francs paid by the Liquida- 
tion Commission for port dues and for the transportation of 
the A. E. F. on French railroads. Translating pounds sterling 
and francs into dollars at average exchange rates, the total 
debit of the United States is found to have been about $120,- 
000,000. The net balance, therefore, in favor of the United 
States as a result of the international war industrial transac- 
tions was the sum, approximately, of $757,000,000. 



CHAPTER XIX 
THE BALANCE SHEET 

WHAT did the war cost America? It may be that 
an accurate answer to that question will never 
be given. Certainly it cannot be given now, 
when the stocks of surplus materials are still being sold and 
the final settlements of the more difficult claims are still being 
made. Still, we can arrive at a fair approximation of what the 
war cost the War Department alone. In doing so we must 
deal with billions of dollars in our columns, and therefore 
errors and differences of a few millions, or even of a few hun- 
dred millions, have no important effect upon the totals. Even 
if all costs and credits could be figured out to the penny, the 
result would not be much unlike the estimates which follow. 
As a starting point we can take the appropriations for the 
Army made by Congress, since all the war costs of the War 
Department must be included within those appropriations. 
And we find that for the Army Congress appropriated in all, 
for every war purpose, the sum of $24,373,274,223.67. But 
not all these appropriations were expended. Some were made 
late in the war, and none of the money authorized by these 
acts to be spent was even obligated before the armistice ter- 
minated all proposed new projects. Congress hastened to repeal 
the untouched appropriations, and the various repeal acts 
canceled authorizations to the amount of $7,703,448,569.36. 
Therefore, the net amount made available to the War Depart- 
ment by the war appropriations was $16,669,825,654.31. 

This figure still does not represent the gross war cost of 
maintaining the War Department, but it is close to it. Since 
final expenditures and reimbursements have not yet been de- 
termined, but are still growing, as claims are paid and surplus 
property is sold, it is necessary that we accept a date some- 



3i6 DEMOBILIZATION 

where and examine the ledger on that day, and from this 
examination we may be able to estimate closely the final 
figures. The date chosen here is April 17, 1920, — a day far 
enough this side of the armistice to bring the figures fairly 
close to their ultimate and conclusive form. By that day the 
Army was almost completely demobilized, the liquidation of 
the Army's foreign affairs was virtually complete, the de- 
mobilization of the domestic war industry was approaching the 
end, and the greater part of the surplus war supplies had 
been sold. 

On April 17, 1920, then, we find that the actual expendi- 
tures of the War Department had reached the total of $16,- 
276,288,337.19. This was within $400,000,000 of the net war 
appropriations, the difference, of course, being in the Treasury 
as unexpended balances available to those paying the final war 
bills of the War Department. Yet this expenditure cannot be 
labeled the cash cost of the war to the Army. We must first 
make several large deductions for money derived from sales 
of materials and, especially, for the property on hand set 
aside for the permanent Army and for the military readiness 
of the United States. 

The foreign liquidation, as we have seen, recovered into the 
Treasury approximately $757,000,000. On April 17, 1920, 
the sales of military property in the United States had brought 
in the sum of $641,261,000. Transfers of army property for 
use by other departments of the Government — a proper credit 
— involved materials valued at $42,096,000. On the date 
selected there still remained in the United States surplus, but 
unsold, army property valued at $600,000,000. The average 
recovery from the sale of surplus within the United States was 
about 75 per cent of the cost. Assuming that this ratio would 
hold throughout the entire liquidation, we can anticipate a 
cash recovery of $450,000,000 from the surplus still existing 
on April 17, 1920.* 

These reimbursements, however, even in the aggregate, con- 

* Due to the slump in business and prices in 1921, this estimate is probably 
too high. 



THE BALANCE SHEET 317 

stitute a minor credit when compared with the value of the 
equipment left by the war enterprise to be the inheritance of 
the permanent establishment and to be insurance of the con- 
tinued safety of the United States in a world not yet willing 
to lay down its arms. The property of the War Department 
at the beginning of the war with Germany was estimated to be 
worth $500,000,000. At the end of the demobilization the 
property of the War Department was worth, at a rough 
estimate, $6,000,000,000. It is evident, therefore, that this 
increment in value — $5,500,000,000 — represents present use- 
ful property, and that it must be subtracted from the expendi- 
tures in order to arrive at the net cost of the war itself. This 
valuation of property on hand, incidentally, does not include 
the value of real estate and buildings acquired during the war 
and retained in use afterwards, since it has never been fully 
determined as yet which of these installations will be kept. 

The deductions, then, on account of sales and on account of 
property retained, amount to $7,390,000,000, and this is the 
gross credit on the war page of the army ledger. To find the 
net cost of the war proper, we must subtract this from the 
gross expenditures, and we must do this roughly ; because with 
transactions so large, indefinite, and complicated, it becomes 
absurd to reduce the figures to cents or even to thousands of 
dollars. The rough subtraction gives us the figure $8,885,000,- 
000, which is not many millions away from the actual net 
cost. This, of course, represents cost to the War Department 
alone. It does not include the Navy's costs, nor those of the 
United States Shipping Board, nor of the United States Rail- 
road Administration, nor any costs of other great and expen- 
sive war enterprises which properly must be added in to give 
the full score of the cost of the war to the United States. 

This net cost, this sum of $8,885,000,000, represents what 
the Government paid in transporting the 4,000,000 men of 
the Army, in feeding them, clothing them, and providing them 
with all other sorts of expendable supplies which they actually 
consumed, and in paying the troops their wages. The supply 
cost, of course, includes the cost of the industrial liquidation 



3i8 DEMOBILIZATION 

after the armistice and the losses from the shrinkages and 
wastes of war. The whole bill comes out at about $2,2oo a 
man. 

This, too, is but the direct cash cost, the cost in money. The 
intangible costs, which are never brought into a tabulation of 
this kind, are, after all, the true costs of war. They include 
the 50,000 American soldiers killed in battle in Europe. They 
include also the 200,000 Americans who were wounded in the 
fighting — some of them still, two and a half years after the 
armistice, in hospitals and thousands of them facing life with 
permanently impaired bodies. These usually unreckoned costs, 
too, include the 57,000 who died of disease or accident while 
in the service. 

But beyond these losses of life there were other profound 
penalties which the people paid and are still paying. These, 
too, must be set down to the account of war in any complete 
reckoning. One of them was the greatly increased cost of almost 
everything necessary to sustain life and render it pleasant, 
including particularly an increase of rentals, bringing with it, 
as a natural consequence, the overcrowding of living quarters, 
to the detriment of the health of those existing in such condi- 
tions. The high costs of living are aggravated by the special 
war taxes laid everywhere, taxes which, in one form or another, 
must be imposed for many years to come in order to pay for 
the losses of the war. 

There were, moreover, spiritual losses — an incredible moral 
slump from the national exaltation of the war to the bickering 
and bitterness of the demobilization. Governments fell as the 
war-ridden peoples of the earth blindly and brutishly vented 
their spleen and irritation for the hardships they had experi- 
enced upon those who chanced to be in power. Erstwhile states- 
manship lapsed into a narrow, advantage-seeking partizanship 
that regarded not, it sometimes seemed in this country, even the 
fate of the world. The United States turned its back upon the 
League of Nations, which was the most ambitious attempt ever 
made by the nations of the earth to substitute a rule of reason 
for the rule of force. 



THE BALANCE SHEET 319 

But if we recite these and other intangible and indirect costs 
that might be named, then we are equally justified in looking 
for the benefits derived from our participation in the war ; and 
we find these benefits to be great ones. First of all, we gained 
the victory; and that alone, and especially so because the cause 
of America was righteous, was worth all it cost in blood and 
money and burdens shouldered for the future. We gained, 
moreover, a state of preparedness for war that would have been 
impossible of attainment under any other circumstances. In the 
reserves of supplies we have equipment ready to arm 1,000,- 
000 men as rapidly as they can take the field. In the reserves 
of machinery we have a potential war industry capable of 
maintaining such an army until industry generally can take 
up the manufacture of munitions. Not again during the exist- 
ence of the present generation should we, if the emergency 
came, have to experience the uncertainties and delays of 1917 
in the production of supplies. We have within our war reserves 
the machinery and the materials for producing all the more 
difficult sorts of munitions, and we have, moreover, preserved 
records of how to produce them. 

Then, again, the health of the nation has presumably gained 
a benefit from the experience. Hundreds of thousands of young 
men were removed from sedentary occupations and placed in 
the vigorous, ordered, athletic regimen of camp life. Several 
months of this, on the average, did not fail to have its effect, 
and the medical records of the Army showed a marked increase 
in the average weight of soldiers during the war. Akin to this 
consideration is the fact that men were picked up from farms, 
villages, and city neighborhoods and transported to distant 
parts of the earth. This travel broadened thousands of them, 
quickened their ambition, and strengthened their life purposes. 
Moreover, the men of the Army were thoroughly mixed in the 
ranks and services. The boy from Maine fraternized with the 
one from Arizona, and Illinois and Virginia sent their sons to 
be comrades. Sectional, national, and even racial lines dis- 
appeared in the ranks. This extensive regional interacquaint- 
anceship is to-day a national asset. The infiltration of 4,000,- 



320 DEMOBILIZATION 

ooo men who secured these individual benefits into the civilian 
life of America is calculated to elevate the physical, mental, 
and moral tone of the whole nation and to improve America's 
homogeneity. 

Other benefits might be named. The principle of selective 
military service has been established by the precedent set in 
the World War. As long as that experience is remembered 
there will be no danger that America would ever return, in any 
serious emergency, to the unscientific volunteer system that 
takes the brave and the enterprising and leaves behind the in- 
dolent and timorous. Above all, we must count as gain from 
the war the confirmation it gave us in our faith in our ability to 
continue our existence as a nation. The experience demon- 
strated that our national resources include not only valor in 
arms in boundless quantity, but also the ability to organize 
effectively a nation as great as ours for a purpose as compli- 
cated as modern war has come to be. The experience in 1917 
and 1918 gave us a firm foundation for national self- 
confidence. 

These are all benefits and gains which may properly be set 
off against the intangible costs of the war. Among the benefits 
secured, however, is not yet one which we might, in 1917 and 
1918, have expected to find there. The American host which 
crossed to France went, almost to a man, uplifted and made 
heroic by the feeling that it was an army of crusaders fighting 
to end wars forever. No mere instinct of self-preservation, no 
simple prospect of a victory over a strange, foreign enemy in 
gray uniforms, could have inspired the morale of the American 
Expeditionary Forces, nor yet that of the forces in training in 
the United States, nor that of American industry in its eager, 
headlong devotion to the national undertaking. This was to be 
Armageddon, the last of wars, the war to make safe the unwar- 
like peoples of the world; and no cynical dictum that man is 
still too near his neolithic savagery to rely on anything other 
than might in his international contentions, no Chauvinistic 
picture of new migrations of Asiatic hordes, can change the 
fundamental fact that America went to war in the belief that 



THE BALANCE SHEET 321 

its chief est object was to end war forever. Until we have made 
some national attempt to secure that benefit, the page will 
not balance. 



INDEX 



ABERDEEN PROVING 
/\ GROUND, 176 

Abuse of Uniform, 109-110 

Agriculture, Department of: 
Army supplies transferred to, 

43. 275-276 
Army surplus nitrate sold by, 274 

Aircraft : 

Production, 199-203 

Storage, 2o8 

Aircraft Board, .204 

Aircraft Industrial Demobiliza- 
tion, 204-207 

Airplane Engines : 

Returned by A. E. F., 210 

Sale of surplus, 280 

War production, 202-203, 206 

Airplane Lumber, 280 

Airplane Lumber Claim, 293-294 

Airplanes : 

Burning of unserviceable, 211-213 
Contracts, 199 

Production, 202, 206 

Returned by A. E. F., 210-211 

Sale of surplus, 280 

Air Service : 

Demobilization of, 

50, 133, 204, 207, 280-281 

Air Service Claims Board, 204 

Air Service of A. E. F. : 

Demobilization, 210-213 

Maintenance cost, 203 

Allies : 

Business settlement with, 

287.288, 313-314 

Allotments, 71-72 

Amatol Arsenal, 188 

American Brake Shoe & Foundry 
Co.: 
Builders of Erie Howitzer 
Plant, 171 



American Car & Foundry Co.: 

Claim of, 156 

Post-armistice production by, 179 

American Cyanimid Co.: 

Process of, at Muscle Shoals 
fixation plant, 184 

American Expeditionary Forces: 
Identification of dead of, 85, 89-91 
Repatriation of, 38-42 

Strength of, 1 

Welfare activities in, 92-97 

American Legion : 

And abuse of uniform, 110 

And bonus, 69 

And disabled veterans, 104 

American Red Cross : 

Bonus payment aided by, 69 

Demobilization camp banks of, 110 
Soldier reemployment campaign 
aided by, 109 

Ammonium Nitrate, 274 

Ammunition, Artillery : 

Disposal of, 188-190 

Anglo-American Tank Project, 

298-300 

Anglo-American Tanks : 

Purchase of British parts for, 

300-301 

Animals : 

See Horses and Mules 

Appel, Monte : 

Claims against French settled 
by, 295 

Appraisers, War Department 

Board of, 142 

Army : 

Status of demobilization, Feb- 
ruary 28, 1919, 50 
Strength, 1 

Army Retail Stores, 282-285 

Army Subsistence School, 247-248 



324 INDEX 

Artillery Carriages: 

Demobilization of industry pro- 
ducing, 174-175 
Artillery, Field : 

Production, 164, 175, 176 

Reserve manufacturing facilities 

for, 168, 172 

Reserves of, 175j 176 

Artillery, Motorization of, 194 

Artillery, Railway : 

Demobilization of industry pro- 
ducing, 176-180 
Assistant Secretary of War, The : 
As president of War Depart- 
ment Claims Board, 135 
Purchase of cantonment sites 
ordered by, 265 
Attorney General : 

Ruling of, against commission 
agents, 123 

Ayer, Lieut. Col. F. R.: 
On Ordnance Claims Board, 



147 



BABCOCK, COL. CONRAD 
S.: 

"Pershing's Own Regiment" 
trained by, 94 

Baggage, Military, 74-75 

See also Lost Baggage 
Baggage Service, 75-78 

Baldridge, Private C. LeRoy: 

On Stars and Stripes, 96 

Balloons, 203, 206, 213 

Barnes, Lieut. Col. A. V. : 

Chief of Baltimore ordnance 
district, 149 

Bausch & Lomb Optical Co.: 

Optical glass produced by, 192-193 
Beaune, University of, 93 

Belgian Government: 

Supplies sold to, 189, 216, 241, 252 
Belgian Relief Commission, 241 

Benson, Admiral William S.: 

And German passenger vessels, 36 
Billy, M. fidouard de : 

On French Liquidation Commis- 
sion, 294 
Bonus, 51, 69-70 



Boosters and Adapters, 186 

Bordeaux : 
As port of embarkation for 
A. E. F., 11, 12, 16, 19-24, 25, 28 
Boston : 

As port of debarkation. 
Bound Brook Tetranitroaniline 

Plant, 
Boy Scouts : 

Walnut trees hunted by, 
Brashear Co., J. A.: 

Prisms for panoramic sights 
produced by, 
Brass, 
Brest : 
As port of embarkation for A. 
E. F., 11, 12, 16, 17, 24-25, 29 

Briggs & Turivas : 

Senter tetryl plant bought by, 
Briggs, Lieut. Col. M. F.: 

On Ordnance Claims Board, 
British Army : 

Unidentified dead of, 
British Government: 
American claims paid by, 
American surplus aircraft sold 

by. 
Ships of, withdrawn from 
American service, 
Britt, Field Clerk James A.: 

On Stars and Stripes, 
Browns : 

Number of, in Army, 
Bryant, Waldo C: 
Chief of Bridgeport ordnance 
district, 
Buford,\J.^.\. T.: 

Conversion of. 
Bulk Sale of A. E. F. Property, 

309-312 
Bullard Engineering Works : 
Demobilization of ordnance 
work at, 165-167 

Burr, Maj. Gen. G. W.: 

British claims settled by, 303-304 
On War Department Claims 
Board, 135 

Burr-Niemeyer Agreement, 303-304 



54 



182 



157 



191 

277 



182 



147 



84 



294 



213 



31 



95 



70 



148 



35 



Bush Terminal Co.: 
Cartridge cloth sold 



by. 



285 
261-264 
223-226 

264-266 

40 



CAMPHOR, 
Camps, Sale of. 
Candles, Toxic, 
Cantonments : 

Purchase of sites of. 
Cape May, U. S. A. C. T. 

Loading record of. 
Cargo : 

Quantity of A. E. F., returned, 

42-43 
Cargo Transports, Conversion of, 

32, 34-35 
Cartridge Cloth, 278-280 

Castor Bean Case, 208-210 

Cemeteries, American, in Europe, 

86-89 
Charleston : 

As port of debarkation, 54 

Chateauroux Tank Plant, 195 

Chemical Warfare Service : 
Demobilization activities of, 

133, 220-227, 282 
Nitrogen fixation plant built 
for, 184-185 

Chicago Storage Depot, 187 

Claims, Soldiers', 70-73 

Classification Board, 142 

Coffin, Howard E. : 

As chairman of Aircraft Board, 204 
Combat Troops, Embarkation of, 13 
Commerce, Secretary of: 
War contract conference called 
by, 117 

Construction Division, 257-266 

Construction Division Claims 

Board, 260 

Construction in France, 214, 215 

Contract Adjustment, Board of: 
Function, 124, 137 

Informal contracts settled by, 

140-141 
Contractors, Ordnance, 159-162 

Contract Review, Superior Board 

of, 122-124 



237 
140 
140 



INDEX 325 

Contracts : 
280 See Cost-plus Contracts and 

War Contracts 
Contracts and Adjustments, Board 

of. 
Contracts, Class A, 
Contracts, Class B, 

Contracts, Informal, 126-128, 139-141 
Contracts, Surveyor of, 121 

Copper, 274 

Cost-plus Contracts, 

114-116, 117-121, 124-125 
Council of National Defense, 

106-107, 248 
Cross-Channel Cable, A. E. F., 229 
Cupro-nickel, 277-278 

Cuthell Board, 288-296 

Cuthell, Chester W.: 
Activities of, in settlement of 
international claims, 290-296 



288 



Cuthell Board organized by, 
Cuthell-Inverforth Agreement, 

291, 293 
Czecho-Slovakia : 

Supplies bought by, 242 

Czecho-Slovak Siberian Troops, 

46 (footnote) 



D 



,AILY MAIL, LONDON : 

Stars and Stripes printed in 
plant of, 95 

Dawes, Brig. Gen. Charles G. : 
On United States Liquidation 
Commission, 296, 297 

Debarkation Camps, 55-57 

Deceased Soldiers' Effects, 80-83 

Delano, Col. F. A.: 

French railroad transportation 
claim settled by, 308 

Delousing, 17-19, 57 

Demobilization Centers, 49 

Demobilization Problems, 3, 4-8 

Dent Act, 128, 140 

Diphenolchlorarsine, 223-226 



Disability in Service, 

Dodge Brothers : 
Recuperator plant of. 
Truck contracts with. 



63 (footnote) 

172-174 
232 



326 



INDEX 



Dorr, G. H.: 

On War Department Claims 
Board, 135 

Dravo, Ralph M.: 
Chief of Pittsburg ordnance dis- 
trict, 150 
Du Pont Powder Co.: 

Claim of, 156 

Dyes manufactured by, 182 



EARLY, CAPT. STEPHEN 
T.: 

On Stars and Stripes, 96 

Eddystone Rifle Plant, 196 

Effects Bureau, 80-83 

Embarkation Camps, A. E. F., 16-17 
Embarkation Service : 
Merged in Transportation Serv- 
ice, 57 
Employment Service, United 

States, 106-108 

Engineer Claims Board, 219 

Engineer Department, 

50, 213-219, 281-282 
Engineering Supplies, 216-218 

Equipment, Soldier's, 21 

Erie Howitzer Plant, 167, 171 

Erie Proving Ground, 176 

Eustis, Camp Abraham, 177 

Expeditionary Bases, Disposal of, 

45-46, 258 

FINAL-PAYMENT ROLLS, 66 
Finance, Director of : 

And final payment to oflScers, 67-69 

And wounded soldiers, 65-66 

Finance Service, 64-69, 133, 266 

First Censor and Press Company, 96 
First Division, 29, 59-62 

Fisher, Harry A.: 

On Cuthell Board, 294 

Fisher, William : 

On Cuthell Board, 294 

Fixed Nitrogen Commission, 183, 185 
Food Administration, United 
States : 

Contract settlements of, 141 



Ford Motor Co.: 

Tank contracts with, 195 

Truck contracts with, 232 

Forest Service : 

Supplies turned over to, 228 

Forward to the Farm! Why 
Not?: 
In reemployment campaign, 110 

Frankf ord Arsenal : 

Machinery concentrated at, 

181, 187, 191, 192, 198 
French Claims, 306-308 

French Government: 

American supplies purchased 
by, 190, 213, 216, 229, 230, 238-240, 
242, 245, 252, 281, 311-313 
Claims negotiations with, 

217, 295, 306-309 
French Liquidation Commission, 294 



GAS DEFENSE DIVISION, 220 
Gas, Toxic, 220-222, 226-227 
General Sales Agent and Board, 

240, 241 
General Vehicle Co.: 

French contract with, settled, 295 
Genicart, Camp, 23 

German Passenger Ships, 35*36 

Goethals, Maj. Gen. G. W.: 
Purchase, Storage, and Traffic 
Division built around, 234 

Graham, Col. J. H.: 
A. E. F. property inventoried 
by, 309-310 

Grand Central Palace Debarka- 
tion Hospital, 99 
Graves Registration Service, 85-91 
Great Northern, U. S. A. T., 39 
Greenhut Building Debarkation 

Hospital, 99 

Greenwood, Levi H.: 
Chief of Boston ordnance dis- 
trict, 148 
Gun Plants, 167-168 
Gwinn, Ralph W. : 

Work of, on Cuthell Board, 291, 292 



HARNESS, 286 

Harrisburg Manufacturing 
& Boiler Co. : 
Railway artillery produced 
after armistice by, 178, 179 

Harrison, C. L. : 
Chief of Cincinnati ordnance 
district, 150 

Hawley, Private Hudson: 

On Stars and Stripes, 95 

Hidden-loss Claim, British, 302-303 
Hill, Camp, S5 

Hines, Brig. Gen. Frank T.: 
As chief of Transportation 

Service, 57 

Foreign passenger vessels se- 
cured by, 36 
Plan of, for repatriation of 
A. E. F., 30-32 
Hoboken Casual Companies, 56 
Hollis, Hon. Henry F. : 

On United States Liquidation 
Commission, 296, 297 

Hoover, Herbert: 

Surplus food purchased by, 241 

Horses and Mules, 244-246, 253-255 



INDEX 327 

Inverforth, Lord : 

Empowered to deal with Cuth- 
ell Board, 290-291 

Italian Government: 

American claims paid by, 295 



Horse Shows in A. E. 


F.. 


94 


Hospital Trains, 




99-100 


Howe, Richard F. : 






On Aircraft Board, 




204 


Humphreys, Camp, 




268 



36 



IMPERATOR,S.S., 
Imperial Munitions Board : 
American contracts in Canada 
settled by, 140, 142, 

Informal Contracts : 

See Contracts, Informal 
Inland Traffic Service, 
Interallied Maritime Transport 

Council, 

Interdepartmental Conference, 117-121 
Interior, Secretary of: 

Army lands sold by, 267 

Invalid Contracts: 

See Contracts, Informal 
Inventory and Appraisal of A. E. 

F. Property, 309-311 



148 



57 



36 



JACKLING, D. C: 
Nitro powder plant contracts 
adjusted by, 142-143 

Jadwin, Brig. Gen. Edgar: 
A. E. F. installations appraised 
by, 310 

Jadwin Report, 310 

Japan Paper Co.: 

Ordnance claim of, 158 

Johnson, Homer H. : 
On United States Liquidation 
Commission, 296, 297 

Jones, John C. : 
Chief of Philadelphia Ordnance 
district, 149 



K 



EUFFEL & ESSER: 

Optical glass produced by, 

192-193 



L 



ABOR, DEPARTMENT 
OF: 

War industry terminated on 
advice of, 131, 132 

Lamont, Col. R. P.: 

On Ordnance Claims Board, 147 
La Pallice, 12 

Layton, W. T. : 

On Inverforth Commission, 291 

League of Nations, 318 

Leather, 286 

Le Havre, 12 

Le Mans: 

Embarkation area at, 

13-15, 23, 24, 28, 53-54 
Lewis, Capt. W. Lee : 

Lewisite invented by, 223 

Lewisite, 223, 226 

Liberty Engine Claim, 292, 293 



328 



INDEX 



Liquidation Commission, United 
States : 
Claims settled by, 

217, 298-303, 304-305. 306-309 
Creation, function, and policies 

of, 288-290, 296 

Property sold by, 210, 240, 309-313 
Loading Plants, 188 

Lost Baggage, 72, 75-77, 79-80 

Lost Baggage Bureau, 75, 76-77, 78-79 
Loucheur, M. Louis: 
Refusal of, to pay Anglo-Ameri- 
can tank claim, 300 
Lumber, 273 



MAHOGANY, 280 

Marion Steam Shovel Co. : 

Railway artillery produced 
after armistice by, 178 

Marlin-Rockwell Corp.: 

Ordnance claim of, 156 

Marseilles, 12 

Marshall, Waldo H. : 

On Ordnance Claims Board, 147 

Maui, U. S. A. C. T., 39-40 

Maxwell-Chalmers Co.: 

Tractors produced by, 194 

Mayor's Committee of Welcome, 5s 
McClellan, U. S. A. T., 25 

McLane Silk Co. : 

Cartridge cloth sold by, 280 

Meade, Camp, 62 

Medical Department: 

Demobilization activities of, 

49, 61-64, 97-101 
Medical Supplies, 232, 233 

Meigs, Camp, 66 

Meloney, Major William Brown: 

Reemployment pamphlet written 
by, 108 

Merritt, Camp, 55-56 

Midvale Steel & Ordnance Co.: 

Howitzer plant of, 179-180 

Rifle plant of, 196 

"Mill" at Bordeaux, 19-23 

Mills, Camp, ss> 56 



Mines, Bureau of: 
Nitrogen fixation plant built by, 

184-185 
Mobile Repair Shops, 195 

Morel, M. Paul : 
A. E. F. property purchased for 
France by, 311-312 

Morgan Engineering Co. : 

Post-armistice production of 
railway artillery by, 178-179 

Motor Transport Corps, 49, 230-232 
Motor Vehicles, 230-232 

Mules: 

See Horses and Mules 
Muscle Shoals Nitrogen Plant, 

183, 184, 185 

NATIONAL DEFENSE 
ACT, 114 

National Defense, Council of, 

106-107, 248 
Navy Department: 
Army property turned over to, 

180, 275 
Operation of troopships relin- 
quished by, 33 
U. S. A. T. Northern Pacific 

repaired by, 42 

Warships used as troopships by, 36 
Nebraska Aircraft Corp.: 

Army airplanes bought by, 280 

Nervous and Mental Cases in 

Army, 102 

Neuve, Camp, 23 

Neville Island Gun Plant, 180 

New York : 

As port of debarkation, 54 

New York Air Brake Co.: 

Ordnance claims of, 156 

Newport News : 

Debarkation at, 54, 99 

Newport News Shipbuilding Co.: 
Use of, by Transportation 
Service, 34 

Nitrate of Soda, 274 

Nitrogen Fixation Plants, 183-185 

Nitro Powder Plant, 

142-143, 182, 262, 276 



INDEX 



Noble, Frank S.: 

Chief of Rochester ordnance 
district, 
Northern Pacific, U. S. A. T., 
Northwestern Ordnance Co.: 
Machinery of, transferred to 
Erie Howitzer Plant, 



149 

42 



171 



OFFICERS ; 
Final payments to, 67-69 

Transportation of, from France, 

41-42 
Old Hickory Powder Plant, 181 

Operations Division, 259 

Optical Glass, 192-194 

Optical Instruments, 192 

Ordnance Claims Board, 146-147 

Ordnance Contractors, 159-162 

Ordnance Department: 

Demobilization activities of, 

133, 146, 147-159. 163, 164-165 
Ordnance Industry, 145-146 

Ordnance Plants, 276 

Ordnance Salvage Board, 275-280 

Otis Elevator Co.: 
Recuperator plant of, 173, 174 

PARKER, EDWIN B. : 
Chairman of United States 
Liquidation Commission, 296, 297 
Peirce, Brig. Gen. W. S. : 
Chief of Ordnance Claims 
Board, 147 

Perryville Ammonium Nitrate 

Plant, 182 

Pershing, Gen. J. J. : 
A. E. F. disbanded by, 12, 37 

Armistice announced by, 1 

Departure of, from France, 29 

Parades with First Division, 59-61 
Stars and Stripes supported by, 

95. 96-97 
"Pershing's Own Regiment," 94 

Pershing Stadium, 94, 215 

Physiotherapy, iCX)-ioi 

Picatinny Arsenal: 
Machinery concentrated at, 

181, 187, 188 
Picric Acid Plants, 182 



192-193 

277 

242 

16-17 



Pittsburg Plate Glass Co. : 

Optical glass produced by. 
Platinum, 

Polish Relief Corp., 
Pontanezen, Camp, 
Ports of Embarkation, A. E. F., 

10-11, 12, 39 
Portugal : 

A. E. F. supplies bought by, 242 
Post Office Department: 

Supplies turned over to, 228 

Powder Plants, 181, 182 

Preparedness : 

American post-armistice state of, 319 
Public Health Service, 

101-102, 103-104, 252, 275 
Pullman Car Co.: 

Post-armistice production of 
railway artillery materiel by, 179 
Purchase Claims Board, 247 

Purchase, Director of, 

133. 235. 246-248, 252-253 
Purchase, Storage, and Traffic, 
Division of: 
Industrial demobilization con- 
trolled by, 134-135 
Purchasing functions of, 219, 234-235 
War contracts controlled by, 121 

QUARTERMASTER D E - 
PARTMENT, 50, 234-235 

Quartermaster Supplies: 
Demobilization of industry pro- 



ducing. 


246-247 


Purchases of, in Europe, 


235-236 


Sales of: 




To French Government, 


238-240 


To other purchasers. 


240-243 


Storage of. 


251-252 


Termination of European 


con- 


tracts for. 


237 


Value of A. E. F. surplus 


of, 243 



R^ 



ACINE TRINITROTOL- 
UOL PLANT, 142 

Railroad Administration, United 
States : 
Cut rates to discharged soldiers 
granted by, 51 "52 



330 INDEX 

Railroad Claim, French, 217 

Railway Passenger Equipment, 



57-58 
176 
248 

294 
267-268 



192 
172 



Army, 
Raritan Arsenal, 
Raw Materials Division, 
Ray, John H., Jr.: 

On Cuthell Board, 
Real Estate Service, 
Recording & Computing Machines 
Co.: 
Optical instruments produced 
by, 
Recuperators, 
Reeves, Col. Ira L. : 

President of Beaune University, 93 
Remount Service, 244-246, 253-255 
Reo Motor Co.: 

Tractors produced by, 194 

Ritchey, Dr. G. W.: 

Optical workers trained by, 191 

Roads, Bureau of Public : 

Supplies furnished to, 217, 252, 282 
Roberts, George J.: 
Chief of New York ordnance 
district, 149 

Robinson, Fred J.: 

Chief of Detroit ordnance dis- 
trict, 149 
Rochester Gun Plant, 167, 170-171 
Rock Island Arsenal: 

Artillery stored at, 176 

Machinery concentrated at, 

172, 174-175. 197 
Post-armistice production : 
Recuperators, 
36-ton tanks, 
Roosevelt, Theodore : 
Attitude of, toward burial of 
soldiers in France, 
Ross, Private Harold W. : 

As editor of Stars and Stripes, 
Roumania : 

Supplies bought by, 
Russell, E. A.: 

Chief of Chicago ordnance dis- 
trict, 
Russell, Fort D. A.: 
Artillery stored at. 



173 
195 



84 

96 

242 



149 
176 



SALES BRANCH, 269, 271-275 
Sales, Director of, 269-270, 276 
Salvage, 24, 243-244 

Savanna Proving Ground, 176 

School System of A. E. F., 92-93 

Scovil, Samuel: 
Chief of Cleveland ordnance 
district, 149 

Selective Service Men, Entrain- 

ment of, 1, 47-48 

Senter Tetryl Plant, 182 

Seventy-seventh Division, 59, 67 

Sheffield Nitrogen Plant, 183-184, 185 
Shell: 
Demobilization of Industry pro- 
ducing, 185-187 
Disposal of A. E. F. stocks of, 

188-190 
Shell, Gas, 222-223 

Shelton, Charles B. : 

On Cuthell Board, 294 

Sights and Fire-control Instru- 
ments, 190-193 
Signal Corps, 227-229 
Singer Manufacturing Co.: 

Post-armistice production of re- 
cuperators by, 172, 173 
Singleton, Marvin E.: 
Chief of St. Louis ordnance dis- 
trict, 150 
Small Arms: 

Demobilization of industry pro- 
ducing, 195-197 
Small-arms Ammunition, 197-198 
Smith, Dan : 
Reemployment poster painted 
by, 109 
Smith, Sergeant John W. Rixey: 

On Stars and Stripes, 96 

Smiths : 

Number of, in Army, 70 

Smoke, Toxic, 223-226 

Soldier Dead : 

Place of burial of remains of, 

83-84, 91 
Spencer Lens Co. : 

Optical glass made by, 192 



INDEX 



331 



Springfield Armory: 

Machinery stored at, 197 

Spruce Production Corp., 143, 281 

Standard B Trucks, 231 

Standard Contract Provisions, 122-124 
Standards, Bureau of : 

Optical glass manufacture by, 

192, 193-194 
Stars and Stripes, 9-10, 94-97 

Steel, 277 

Steever, Miller D.: 

Work of, on Cuthell Board, 

291, 292-293 
Stettinius, Edward R. : 

Activities of, in settling foreign 
industrial claims, 297, 298, 305-306 
Stewart, Col. G. H.: 

On Ordnance Claims Board, 147 

St. Nazaire : 

As port of embarkation for 
A. E. F., u, 12, 16, 25, 28 



Storage, Director of. 




251 


Storage Service, 




250-252 


Stuart, Camp, 




55 


Sulphur, 




274 


Surplus Army Supplies, 




270-271 


Surplus Property Division 


, 


285-286 


Symington-Anderson Co.: 






Chicago shell factory 


of. 


re- 


tained as stand-by plant. 


187 


Rochester Gun Plant built by, 170 



301 
195 



311 



TANK CLAIM, BRITISH, 
Tanks, 
Tardieu, M. Andre : 

In negotiations leading to bulk 
purchase of A. E. F. stocks, 
Thayer, Harry B. : 

On Aircraft Board, 204 

Theatrical Performances, Soldiers', 94 
Thirty-third Division, 59 

Tires, Automobile, 286 

Toluol Plants, 182-183 

Training Camps : 

Demobilization of troops in, 48-50 
Use of, as debarkation camps, S5 



Transportation Service : 
Air service squadrons in Eng- 
land repatriated by, 38 
Cargo transports redelivered 

by. 43-45- 

Conversion of cargo transports 

by. 34-35 

Creation of, 57 

First Division transported by, 59-60 
German passenger vessels se- 
cured by, 36 
Military passengers carried by, 

after armistice, 59 

Morale of, 32-33, 38-39 

News bureau of, 5jr 

Personnel adjutants of, 41 

Port facilities disposed of by, 45-46 
Pre-armistice stoppage of em- 
barkation by, 37 
Reserve of troopships created 

by, 45 

Russian and Siberian expedi- 
tionary troops repatriated by, 

46 (footnote) 
Sick and wounded transported 



by, 


58-59 


Troopships diverted by, 


54 


Troopships operated by. 


33 


Transports, 


43 


See also Cargo Transports 


and 


Troopships 




Travel Allowance, 


51 


Treasury, Comptroller of: 




Decision of, invalidating 


in- 


formal contracts. 


127 


Trinitrotoluol Plants, 


183 


Troop-movement Section, 


47-48 


Troopships, 31, 34. 


36-37, 45 


Trucks, Motor, 


199, 286 


Tuberculosis, 


102 



Tullytown Bag-loading Plant, 188 

Tuscania, S. S. : 
Identification of effects of sol- 
diers lost in sinking of, 82-83 
Twenty-eighth Division, 59 
Twenty-seventh Division, 59 



332 INDEX 

UNITED STATES AERO- 
NAUTICAL ENGINE 
PLANT, 207 

Universities, Foreign : 

A. E. F. soldiers in, 93-94 

Upton, Camp, 55, 56 



VESSEL OWNERS : 
Demand of, for redelivery 
of chartered tonnage, 33-34 

Veterans : 

Employment campaign for, 104-III 
Generosity of Government to, 104 
Victory Parades, 59 

Vocational Education, Federal 

Board for, 101, 102-104 



WAH CHANG TRADING 
CORP.: 

Ordnance claim of, 158 

Wallgren, Private A. B. : 

On Stars and Stripes, 96 

Walnut Timber, 156-15? 

War Camp Community Service : 

Reemployment campaign of, 109 

War Contracts : 

Extent of, 112-113,128-129 

Standardization of, 122-124 

Termination and liquidation of, 

129-132, 138 
See also Cost-plus Contracts 
War Credits Board, 119-120 (footnote) 
War Department: 
Contract liquidation system of, 

135-136, 138 
Contractors paid in advance by, 

137-138, 141 
Contractual obligations of, 

112-113, 128-129 
Cost of war to, 315-318 

Effect of 1917 organization of, 

upon contracts, 116-117 

Expansion of plant of, 256-257 

Policies of: 

In burying soldier dead, 83-84 
In discharging troops, 

49-51, 52-53, 105-106 



Real Estate Service of, 266-267 

Reemployment campaign of, 104-105 
Reorganization of, in 1918, 121 

War contracting powers of, 114 

War Department Claims Board : 
Castor bean case settled by, 208-210 
Creation and personnel of, 135 

Growth of, 141 

Informal contracts settled by, 140 
Record of, 143-144 

War Industries Board: 
Australasian wool purchased by, 248 
Contracts made by, 141 

Function of, 248 

Termination of war industry 
aided by, 131, 132 

War Industry : 

Extent of, 2-4 

Liquidation of, 132, 133-137 

Warner & Swasey : 

Panoramic sights produced by, 191 

War Risk Insurance, Bureau of: 
Amalgamation of, with other 

veterans' bureaus, 103-104 

Disability compensation paid by, 63 
Function of, 101 

War, Secretary of: 

Order of, as to post-armistice 

production, 131 

Powers under Dent Act dele- 
gated by, 140 
War Department Claims Board 
created by, 135 

Watertown Arsenal : 

Expansion of, 168, 169-170, 174, 180 
Machinery concentrated at, 

178, 179, 180 

Watervliet Arsenal: 

Expansion of, 168-170, 174 

Machinery concentrated at, 180 

Watson, Major Mark: 
On Stars and Stripes, 96 

Weems, F. C: 
On Cuthell Board, 291 

West Indian Laborers, 257 

Where Do We Go from Here? : 
Booklet used in reemployment 
campaign, 108- 109 



INDEX 



333 



White & Co., J. G. : 

Settlement of French contract 
with, 
Willys-Overland, Inc. : 

75-mm. gun carriages produced 
by, 
Wilson, Woodrow, President of 
the United States : 
And Italian delegates to Peace 
Conference, 
Winterich, Corporal John T.: 

On Stars and Stripes, 
Woods, Col. Arthur: 

Reemployment campaign con- 
ducted by. 
Wool Administrator, 



295 



173 



290 



95 



107 
248 



Wool Pool, Liquidation of, 248-250 



Woollcott, Sergeant Alexander: 

On Stars and Stripes, 96 

World War: 

Costs and benefits of, 315-321 

Wounded Soldiers : 

Payment of, 65-66 

Transportation of, 58-59 

Wright-Martin Aircraft Corp.: 
Engine plant of, retained, 207 

OUNG MEN'S CHRIS- 
TIAN ASSOCIATION: 



Y 



Schools of, in A. E. F., 



7 INC, 

f J Zone Finance 

Washington : 
Bonus paid by, 



93 

277 



Officer at 



69 



c-f^ 



PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



DEC -1 ^^ 



